Snippet:
- Average hiring time: 35–45 days.
- Actual time to joining: 2–3 months.
- Here’s what each stage takes, where the bottlenecks are, and how to reduce your hiring timeline to less than 3 weeks.
If you go by the industry average, it takes about 35 to 45 days. Talking about the timeline when you count from the day you opened the role to a signed offer.
But that number can be misleading since it’s only the active hiring time. It leaves out the notice period. Add that, and it goes to 2 to 3 months in the overall timeline.
Read this to get the breakdown where your time goes and what you can do to speed up.
Here’s where your time actually goes
- Sourcing and screening: 1 to 3 weeks.
- Interviews: 2 to 3 weeks.
- Offer and negotiation: 1 to 2 weeks.
- Notice period: 30 to 90 days.
Talking about notice periods in India. They are generally about 30 days for junior roles, 60 for mid-level and above. But if your candidate works at a large services company, then anything above 60 days should be expected.
However, this is different for product startups because that is usually tighter like about 30 to 60 days.
When this timeline gets stretched long
Plan for longer if any of these are true:
- The role is niche or needs deep AI experience.
- Your interview rounds are very long and have a lot of gaps between each round.
- You need a specific background, a certain company or college on the resume.
Where you can speed up and where you can’t
Hiring an engineer is 4 steps: sourcing, screening, interviewing, and the offer. The notice period sits on top of all of it.
Some of these steps you can speed up but some you can’t. Here’s a breakdown.
|
Step |
What happens | Can you speed it up? |
|
Sourcing |
Finding and reaching out to candidates | Yes. A resume vendor or hiring partner fills your pipeline. |
| Screening | Filtering resumes | Yes, with a hiring partner. A resume vendor leaves this with you. |
| Interview scheduling | Coordinating the rounds | Yes. You can either tighten your own processes or have the hiring partner manage this for you. |
| Interview judgment | Deciding if they can do the job | No. This one stays with you. |
| Offer and negotiation | Closing the candidate |
Partly. It moves fast once your team is aligned. |
| Notice period | The wait before they start |
No, but you can buy it out. |
Two things the table leaves out.
- First, screening is usually the real bottleneck, not sourcing. A resume vendor fills your pipeline but leaves the filtering to you, and a bigger pile can mean more work, not less.
A hiring partner hands you a filtered shortlist and runs the scheduling, so you just show up to interview. That’s the biggest time save here. You can hire someone within 2 weeks with the right hiring partner.
- Second, you can’t hand off the judgment of whether someone can do the job. The onus is on you but you can speed up other parts and here’s how. So the real question then becomes which parts do you want to speed up in your hiring process so that you get good quality candidates, fast.
