Ashby’s Kevin Connolly (head of data) and Jenny (recruiting operations consultant) walked through data from Ashby’s RecOps report, covering more than 50 million applications and almost 100,000 jobs. They broke it down by company size and role type, then had tables compare notes.
Time to fill is a predictability metric. Ashby measures time to first fill: from a role with no pipeline to the first hire. Small companies are all over the map. At scale, the median settles around 60 days. Jenny’s point: 40 days ± 5 is something finance can plan around, and 30 days ± 35 isn’t.
Stop reporting 1 global number. Break time to fill out by function, level and location. One customer under fire for slow senior engineering hiring turned out to be running about 10 days faster than in previous quarters once the data was segmented.
Scorecards break down where it matters. Interviewers skip scorecards more often for candidates they don’t hire, which hurts future sourcing. And about half of interviewer disagreements cross the hire/no-hire line, right on the borderline candidates. Ashby flags those splits so teams can recalibrate right away.
Ask for referrals by function. Referrals convert best overall, but only about 1 in 20 gets hired. Engineers referring engineers and sellers referring sellers do meaningfully better than cross-functional referrals. Ask people who they’ve seen do this exact job well.
Archive fast. Candidates rejected within about 9 days still rate the experience highly. After about 3 weeks, they become detractors. Knockout questions and SLA alerts keep forgotten applicants from piling up and polluting your data.
