Ask a frontline recruitment team how it is doing, and time to hire is usually one of the first numbers on the table. Ten days is good. Five is better. Every day a seat stays empty costs overtime, output and patience on the site.
We understand why. We also think the number is quietly measuring the wrong thing.
Time to hire measures when you decided. It says nothing about what you knew when you decided.
A fast decision is not the same as fast evidence
Look at when the evidence arrives in a typical frontline hire, as described in "A New Standard for Frontline Hiring":
- At application: a CV, written by the candidate, checked by nobody.
- At the phone call: a short conversation, different each time, often without written criteria.
- At the offer: the decision. The clock stops. Time to hire looks great.
- After the offer: identity, right to work and certificates are checked, by another team, in another system.
- On the first shift: whether the person can reliably get there for 05:30.
- In the first weeks: whether they can keep the pace, and whether the shift pattern is what they expected.
The dashboard records a fast hire. But most of the evidence that decides whether the hire works out arrived after the clock had stopped.
That is the tension in one sentence: the process is fast at deciding and slow at finding out whether the decision was sound.
Why the metric pushes the wrong way
A headline metric shapes behaviour. If a team is judged on how quickly the offer goes out, the rational move is to decide early and check later. Anything that adds a day before the offer looks like a cost. Anything that happens after the offer is invisible.
So verification drifts to the back. Questions about commute and shift patterns get skipped because they "can be sorted out later". And when a hire fails in week one, it shows up in a different report, owned by a different team, long after the time to hire number was celebrated.
This is especially sharp for staffing agencies. Clients often judge an agency on how fast it fills an order. The agency that sends a shortlist in two days looks better than the one that takes four, even if the second one had checked the certificates.
Speed is not the villain
Let us be clear about what we are not saying. We are not saying "slow down".
In the first quarter of 2026, UWV rated 87 of 93 Dutch occupational groups as tight or very tight. In that market, good candidates have options, and a slow process can lose them. We did look for solid Dutch or European research on how much candidate drop off rises with process length, and we did not find independent data we would trust enough to quote. But nobody who has run frontline hiring needs a study to know that waiting costs candidates.
So speed matters. Our argument is narrower: speed should be measured together with the evidence it bought.
What to measure instead
"A New Standard for Frontline Hiring" pairs time to decision with measures that show what the decision rested on. Two of them change the conversation immediately:
- Checks completed before the offer: the share of hires where identity, right to work and required certificates were checked before the decision, where that is lawful.
- Requirements by evidence level: for one role, how many requirements were verified, demonstrated or structured at the moment of decision, and how many were only claimed or not covered.
Put those next to time to hire, and early leaving in the first weeks, and you get a different picture. A team with a ten day time to hire and most checks before the offer may be doing better than a team with a five day time to hire and every check after it.
Move the evidence, not the deadline
Our view: the goal is to get the right evidence earlier, not to push the decision later.
In practice, that means asking about the start time, shift pattern and physical demands in the first contact, the same way for every candidate. It means checking the certificates that matter during selection, where that is lawful and can be verified. And it means making offers conditional on the legally required checks, completed before the first shift, so a failed check leads to a withdrawn offer rather than an empty seat Verifying Frontline Candidates: Which Identity, Right to Work and Certificate Checks Can Happen Before the Offer?.
None of that has to add days. Much of it is about order, not duration.
Closing thought
Time to hire is not a bad number. It is an incomplete one. On its own, it rewards the team that decides first, not the team that knew enough when it decided.
So here is a question for your next hiring review: for your last ten frontline hires, how much of the evidence that really mattered arrived after the offer?
Read next: How to Measure Quality of Hire in Frontline Recruitment: 10 Measures Across Outcomes, Process and Fairness sets out the measures that belong next to time to hire.
The research behind this argument is in "A New Standard for Frontline Hiring" white paper download page.