Recruitment Time-to-Fill Statistics by Company Size for 2026

Company size affects recruitment, but the public evidence is thinner than many benchmark tables suggest. The strongest current U.S. source, SHRM's 2025 recruiting benchmark, reports an overall median of 44 calendar days for nonexecutive positions and 45 days for executive positions. It also publishes a clear result for extra-large organizations: 61 days for nonexecutive roles and 60 days for executive roles.

That is a useful comparison, not a complete size-by-size league table. SHRM's public brief does not disclose a time-to-fill median for every organization-size band. BLS and LinkedIn publish valuable hiring data by employer size, but they measure openings and hiring activity rather than the number of days between requisition approval and offer acceptance.

Time-to-fill statistics at a glance

Extra-large organizations took 17 more days than the overall median for nonexecutive hiring and 15 more days for executive hiring. SHRM attributes the longer cycle partly to additional approval, posting, and interview time. The report says these organizations spent nearly twice as much time on those stages and carried the highest annual requisition load per recruiter.

The comparison does not prove that size caused the delay. Extra-large employers may recruit for a different mix of jobs, operate in more locations, require more approvals, or use more structured assessment and compliance checks.

What time-to-fill means

SHRM defines time-to-fill as the number of calendar days from the opening of a job requisition to the candidate's acceptance of an offer. Weekends and holidays count.

Time-to-hire uses a later starting point. Ashby's 2026 recruiting analysis defines it as the period between a candidate's application and the accepted offer. A company can therefore have a long time-to-fill and a short time-to-hire if sourcing takes weeks but the successful candidate moves quickly after applying.

Teams should write the start and end events beside every dashboard metric. A label without a definition makes comparisons unreliable.

What SHRM's company-size result shows

SHRM fielded its 2025 benchmarking survey electronically from January 9 through March 3, 2025. The respondent pool included 2,371 active U.S. SHRM members across industries and organization sizes. Results were not weighted, and respondents did not answer every question, so the sample for an individual statistic can be smaller than the total survey sample.

The overall results also changed from earlier SHRM benchmarks. In 2022, executive positions took a median of 60 days and nonexecutive positions took 44 days. By 2025, the executive median had fallen to 45 days while the nonexecutive median remained 44 days. That narrowed a 16-day gap to one day.

Extra-large organizations did not follow the overall pattern. Their 60-day executive and 61-day nonexecutive medians were close to each other, but both were materially slower than the full-sample medians. The evidence points to organizational process as a plausible contributor. It does not support a rule that each increase in headcount adds a fixed number of days.

What the data does not show for small and midsize companies

No current public source reviewed for this article provides a methodologically comparable time-to-fill median for every small, midsize, large, and extra-large band. Publishing estimated values for those missing cells would create false precision.

Ashby's 2026 analysis of more than 54 million applications and 93,000 jobs offers a useful directional finding. Days to first fill vary widely among companies with 1 to 24 employees. The distribution narrows and becomes more consistent as organizations pass 500 employees. Smaller companies can fill a role very quickly, but some searches also remain open much longer. Larger systems appear more predictable even when they are not faster.

Ashby defines days to first fill as the time from job opening to the first hire. That differs slightly from SHRM's offer-acceptance endpoint and comes from customers of one recruiting platform. The two datasets should not be combined into one numerical ranking.

Ashby's separate startup report found that, among companies with fewer than 25 employees, average time-to-hire was 42 days when a recruiter was involved and 62 days without one. This is a candidate-level time-to-hire result, not time-to-fill. It is useful for staffing decisions at small startups but does not complete the missing SHRM size table.

BLS vacancy data by establishment size

The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey provides monthly openings and hires by establishment size. BLS defines small establishments as 1 to 49 employees, medium establishments as 50 to 249, and large establishments as 250 or more. Size is based on the establishment's maximum employment over the previous 12 months at sample selection and stays fixed until the next annual sample is drawn.

In July 2026, BLS reported these seasonally adjusted private-sector job-opening rates:

These rates measure open positions on the last business day of the month as a share of employment plus openings. They do not measure how old the openings are. A high openings rate can reflect expansion, turnover, hard-to-fill jobs, or several factors at once.

JOLTS uses a stratified random sample of about 21,000 nonfarm establishments. Its sample is stratified by ownership, region, industry, and establishment size. This makes it strong labor-market context, but it cannot tell an employer whether its 52-day requisition is fast or slow.

Hiring momentum and company size

Ashby's January 2026 review followed the same cohort of hundreds of companies for eight quarters across 2024 and 2025. Hiring at organizations with fewer than 100 employees declined in every quarter of 2025 relative to the first quarter of 2024, reaching as much as 25% below that baseline. Companies with more than 1,001 employees increased hiring more steadily.

LinkedIn Economic Graph provides a broader labor-market check. Its U.S. Workforce Report said national hiring in August 2025 was 4% lower than a year earlier and more than 20% below August 2019. LinkedIn's hiring rate counts members who add a new employer in the month their job begins and divides that count by the LinkedIn membership in the relevant region. The measure is indexed to correct for changes in platform membership. It shows whether hiring is rising or falling, not how many days a requisition remained open.

This distinction matters for company-size benchmarking. A large company can increase hiring volume while taking longer to fill each requisition. A small company can reduce its hiring volume yet close one priority role quickly. Hiring rate and time-to-fill answer different questions.

Employer surveys use different clocks

Employ's 2025 Recruiter Nation Report surveyed 1,200 U.S. HR decision-makers and recruiters in June and July 2025. It asked how long openings at their organizations had been taking to fill. Respondents reported:

This survey found that 74% reported filling roles within 30 days. That result is not directly comparable with SHRM's 44-day median. Employ asked respondents to select a broad range and reported an average organizational experience. SHRM requested a calculated median based on a defined requisition-to-acceptance interval. Question wording, respondent mix, and calculation method can shift the result.

SmartRecruiters' 2025 benchmark provides another comparison. Its platform data put the global median time-to-hire at 38 days. Because that measure tracks candidate progress rather than the full requisition cycle, it should not replace a time-to-fill benchmark.

How to benchmark your company fairly

Use a cohort that matches the decision. Compare similar roles, locations, employment types, and quarters. A single company-wide median can hide a fast hourly-hiring process and a slow executive search process.

1. Record the exact requisition-open timestamp and offer-acceptance timestamp.
2. Count calendar days if comparing with SHRM.
3. Keep cancelled, paused, and evergreen requisitions in separate categories.
4. Report the median and the 75th percentile. The median describes a typical fill; the upper quartile exposes slow searches.
5. Break the cycle into approval, posting, sourcing, screening, interviews, offer approval, and candidate decision time.
6. Compare the same role family and geography before attributing a difference to company size.

A recruitment assistant can maintain requisition records, schedule interviews, follow up with candidates, and document stage timestamps. Hiring managers should still own job requirements, selection decisions, and any exception to the standard process.

Sources and limitations

• SHRM, 2025 Recruiting Executives Benchmarking, published October 2025. Electronic survey of 2,371 active U.S. SHRM members, fielded January 9 through March 3, 2025. Results were unweighted, and metric-level sample sizes vary.
• SHRM, State of Recruiting 2025, October 20, 2025. Narrative summary of the benchmark and its time-to-fill findings.
• BLS, JOLTS Table 7, July 2026 preliminary estimates. Seasonally adjusted job openings, hires, and separations for private establishments by size.
• BLS, JOLTS establishment-size methodology, size definitions, sampling, modeling, and seasonal-adjustment notes.
• Ashby, "Did hiring pick up in 2025?", January 30, 2026. Fixed-cohort analysis of hundreds of companies across eight quarters.
• LinkedIn Economic Graph workforce insights, accessed September 12, 2026. LinkedIn hiring-rate definitions and the August 2025 U.S. Workforce Report.
• Employ, 2025 Recruiter Nation Report, survey of 1,200 U.S. HR decision-makers and recruiters fielded in June and July 2025.
• SmartRecruiters, Recruitment Benchmarks 2025, global recruiting-platform benchmark reporting a 38-day median time-to-hire.

The SHRM public brief publishes the overall and extra-large time-to-fill medians used here, but not a value for every company-size band. BLS and LinkedIn data describe hiring conditions, not elapsed requisition time. Vendor platform datasets cover their own customers and should not be treated as probability samples of all employers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the average time-to-fill in 2026?

The best current U.S. benchmark is a median, not an average. SHRM reported 44 calendar days for nonexecutive roles and 45 days for executive roles in its 2025 survey, published for use in 2026 planning.

Do large companies take longer to fill jobs?

SHRM's extra-large organizations reported medians of 61 days for nonexecutive roles and 60 days for executive roles, longer than the overall medians. The result does not prove that headcount alone caused the difference.

Is time-to-fill the same as time-to-hire?

No. Time-to-fill begins when the requisition opens. Time-to-hire begins when the successful candidate applies or enters the hiring process. Both usually end at offer acceptance, but organizations should document their exact endpoints.

Should weekends count in time-to-fill?

Count calendar days when comparing with SHRM's 2025 benchmark. If an internal dashboard uses business days, label it clearly and do not compare it directly with SHRM's figures.

Why is there no full table for every company size?

The current public sources reviewed here do not publish comparable fill-day medians for each size band. The article reports only disclosed values rather than estimating the missing cells.