Open data
UK hiring benchmarks: 46 filled roles
How long a role actually takes to fill, and how many candidates it takes to fill one — measured on real vacancies we were instructed on, worked, and closed as filled. Free to quote, with attribution.
Most published recruitment statistics are surveys of opinion or industry averages of other people's surveys. These are not. Every figure below is derived from 46 vacancies across 18 sectors that we filled, and each one is published individually with its own pipeline.
Headline figures
42 days
Median time to fill
brief to close, including the employer's own interview stages
14–169 days
Full range
fastest and slowest of the 46
30
Candidates worked per hire
sourced and screened, across the whole set
2.8
Client interviews per hire
how many people an employer met per hire made
The quartiles matter more than the median for planning: a quarter of roles closed inside 29 days and a quarter took longer than 69 days. The mean is 52 days — higher than the median, because a small number of genuinely difficult searches pull it up. Any provider quoting an average rather than a median is using its hardest roles to flatter nothing.
The hiring funnel
Cumulative counts across all 46 roles — every real candidate at every stage.
| Stage | Candidates | Share of sourced |
|---|---|---|
| Sourced & screened | 1,542 | 100% |
| Internal interview | 560 | 36% |
| Presented to client | 235 | 15% |
| Client interview | 143 | 9% |
| Hired | 51 | 3% |
Read as conversion rates: 15% of everyone sourced was worth presenting to the employer, 61% of presented candidates reached a client interview, and 36% of client interviews ended in a hire. An employer should expect to interview about three people per hire, not one.
Time to fill by sector
Sorted fastest to slowest. Read the role count alongside it — a single-role sector is one story, not a benchmark, and we have left the counts in rather than presenting one role as a trend.
| Sector | Roles | Median days | Median candidates worked |
|---|---|---|---|
| IT & technology | 2 | 26.5 | 34 |
| Accountancy & finance | 5 | 29 | 26 |
| Legal | 3 | 32 | 34 |
| Building services & trades | 4 | 35 | 17 |
| Transport & logistics | 2 | 36.5 | 11.5 |
| Healthcare & clinical | 1 | 40 | 19 |
| Insurance & financial services | 3 | 40 | 30 |
| Procurement & supply chain | 1 | 41 | 18 |
| Motor & automotive | 1 | 42 | 10 |
| Utilities & infrastructure | 3 | 42 | 33 |
| Construction & property | 3 | 44 | 14 |
| Charity & community | 2 | 47.5 | 49.5 |
| Sales engineering | 2 | 58 | 78.5 |
| Engineering & manufacturing | 3 | 60 | 40 |
| Care & social care | 4 | 63.5 | 43 |
| Facilities & cleaning | 1 | 68 | 40 |
| Precision machining & maintenance | 5 | 74 | 19 |
| Recruitment | 1 | 76 | 20 |
Methodology, including what is excluded
- Population: 46 vacancies across 18 sectors, each closed in our CRM with a reason of "filled".
- Time to fill is the date the vacancy was closed minus the date it was opened, date-only. It includes the employer's own interview and offer stages, which is the longest and least flattering way to measure it.
- Funnel counts are cumulative — a candidate at "Presented" is also counted at every earlier stage.
- Excluded: filled vacancies that record no hire against them, and any role not closed as filled. This is therefore a funnel of successes: it describes what filling a role took, not the odds of any given role being filled. It would be the wrong dataset for claiming a success rate, which is why we do not.
- Not anonymised away: every underlying placement is published with its own funnel. Clients are described by type and region rather than named, and placed candidates are never named.
- Currency of the data: figures update automatically as placements are added — this page computes them from the source dataset rather than restating them, so it cannot fall out of date.
Citing this data
Free to quote, in full or in part, for any purpose including commercial, with attribution and a link. No permission needed and no need to ask — though we like hearing about it.
TalentFinder UK, "UK hiring benchmarks: 46 filled roles".
https://www.talentfinderuk.co.uk/recruitment-data
Journalists and researchers wanting a breakdown we have not published — by salary band, region or role type — can email info@talentfinderuk.co.uk and we will run it.
What we take from it
Three things this data changed in how we talk to employers. Sector is a weak predictor — two roles in the same sector took 14 and 169 days. Interview turnaround is the biggest lever an employer controls and it costs nothing. And the gap between 15% presented and 36% hired-from-interview is where most of the real work sits, which is the part a fee is actually buying.
The commercial context, stated plainly so you can weigh it: we sell fixed-fee recruitment, and this dataset comes from our own filled roles. It is our work, so it is not a market average — it is one provider's record, published in full so it can be checked. What that costs is published too.