Time-to-hire and time-to-fill
Last updated: August 16, 2026
Time to hire and time to fill are two of the most common speed metrics in recruiting, and they're easy to mix up because both sound like "how fast are we hiring." They measure different things: time to hire looks at a candidate's journey, and time to fill looks at a requisition's. Kula reports both, but understanding what each one actually counts, and which date they're filtered by, matters before you compare them or report them to stakeholders.
You'll find time to hire on the Hires report and the Recruiter performance report, and time to fill on the Requisitions report. Both are also available as tiles when you build a custom report.
Time to hire
Time to hire is the average time from when a candidate applied to a job to the date they were hired. It's a candidate-level metric: every hire has its own time to hire, and the number Kula shows you is the average across the hires in your report.
The Hires report filters by hire date. If you set a date range of the last 30 days, Kula includes every candidate hired in that window and averages how long each of their individual journeys, from application to hire, took. It doesn't matter when they applied, only when they were hired.
Kula displays time to hire as a rounded number of days for typical hiring timelines, or hours or minutes for unusually short ones.
Time to fill
Time to fill is a requisition-level metric, not a candidate-level one: it's the average time between a requisition opening and that requisition being filled.
A requisition moves through several statuses in Kula: draft, pending approval, approved, open, filled, and closed. Kula sets a requisition's open date when it moves into the Open status, and sets its filled date when it moves into Filled, which happens either when an offer tied to the requisition is accepted, or when a hire is associated with it directly. Time to fill is the gap between those two dates.
Note: A requisition can be associated with more than one hire when it covers a group of openings. Time to fill only reflects the point at which Kula marks the requisition Filled, not every hire that eventually rolls up to it.
Time to fill is filtered by open date, not fill date
Unlike the Hires report, the Requisitions report filters by when a requisition was opened, not by when it was filled or closed. Requisitions opened, Requisitions filled, Requisitions closed, and Avg. time to fill are all counted against the same cohort: requisitions that were opened in your selected date range, shown by their current status.
That means:
A requisition opened in your date range but not yet filled counts toward Requisitions opened, but not toward Requisitions filled or Avg. time to fill, no matter how long you wait.
A requisition that was opened in your date range and later filled, even after the date range ends, counts toward Requisitions filled and Avg. time to fill once it's filled.
A requisition filled during your date range, but opened before it started, doesn't count toward Requisitions filled or Avg. time to fill at all, because it isn't in the opened-in-range cohort.
Time to hire vs. time to fill: why the numbers don't line up
Because time to hire is filtered by hire date and time to fill is filtered by open date, the two metrics can describe different sets of records even when you run them for the same date range and the same job. A requisition can also stay open past a single hire if it covers more than one opening, so its time to fill won't always match the time to hire of the candidate who filled it.
Note: Time to close, on the Jobs report, is a related but separate metric: the average time to close a job, filtered by the job's open date the same way time to fill is. It measures the job, not the requisition or the candidate, so don't treat it as another name for time to fill.