Time-to-Hire Is Mostly Hiring Manager Time

When a hire takes too long, people usually look at recruiting first. That's natural. Recruiting has its own team, its own metrics and its own budget, so it's the part of the process everyone knows how to improve. A lot of effort this year is going into exactly that: AI screening, sourcing automation, better ATS workflows. Those help at the margins. But teams improve all of them and still miss their fill dates, and when you look at where the time actually went, most of it was spent waiting on the hiring manager.

Follow a shortlist after the recruiter sends it. The candidates don't go straight into interviews. First someone has to find time on the manager's calendar, and one estimate puts the gap between sending interview requests and getting the first confirmed slot at 6.4 business days. After that come the later rounds, often two to four more before anyone decides. Each of them waits on the same calendar, which is already full of one-on-ones, planning cycles and quarterly reviews. So the stretch everyone thinks of as recruiting time is mostly manager time.

Put rough numbers on it. A commonly cited figure puts the average time from application to offer at mid-market companies at 43 days. If the recruiting team hands over a shortlist in 10 to 14 days, as many do, then roughly four weeks of the process is spent waiting for 90-minute windows to open up in someone's week.

I don't think that makes hiring managers the villains. Look at what they're asked to do. For each role they may interview six, eight, sometimes twelve people, and every interview means prep, the conversation itself, and written feedback afterward. A single role can easily add up to 12 to 15 hours of interview work in a month. Now picture a company with 20 roles open at once. The managers can't keep up, and the process stalls at the one step nobody else can do, weeks after the recruiter finished their part.

Why do managers see so many people? Because underneath most hiring processes is an assumption that more interviews lead to better decisions. See more candidates, interview each one more thoroughly, and you'll hire with more confidence. It sounds right. But research on interview accuracy generally finds that after two or three rounds, extra interviews add little and can make decisions worse, since each new opinion tends to add noise faster than it adds information. What predicts a good hire is whether the early assessment of someone's core abilities was accurate. A fourth interviewer meeting the same person the first three already met rarely changes that.

So when a team manages to interview fewer people without cutting corners, it's usually because the people they do interview were properly vetted earlier. The manager meets two or three candidates someone has actually assessed, instead of seven pulled from a pile that was filtered by keyword match and a 20-minute phone call.

Underneath the overloaded calendar, then, is a first screen that doesn't tell the manager enough. A standard recruiter phone screen can confirm that someone is available and can communicate. It rarely tells the manager what they want to know before walking into the room: how the person works through a problem, how they describe their own experience when pressed a little, and whether they fit this role on this team. When the screen can't answer those questions, the manager answers them the only way available, by seeing more candidates personally. Uncertainty left at the top of the funnel gets resolved further down, in the manager's calendar and at the manager's cost.

Asendia exists to answer more of those questions earlier. A recruiter can only hold so many real screening conversations in a day, and that limit is part of why a standard phone screen stays short. Software doesn't have it, so every applicant can get a proper spoken conversation, and nobody waits in a queue for a free slot on a recruiter's day. The conversation adapts as it goes, following up on what the candidate actually says and asking for specifics the way a good interviewer would, and it keeps the exchange word for word. For each candidate the recruiter gets a summary against the criteria set for that role, with real quotes, which is a lot more useful than a resume score. Recruiters inherit a ranked, documented shortlist in the ATS, and for agencies it also means a spike in applications doesn't require hiring more recruiters.

None of this makes managers faster at interviewing. What changes is how many interviews they need before they feel sure. If the people reaching them have already had a real first conversation, a decision takes fewer rounds, and fewer rounds means fewer weeks waiting on calendars. Speed through this stage pays off again at the very end, when candidates decide whether to accept; the piece on why offer rejection rates are climbing gets into that.

So I'd stop asking hiring managers to interview faster or block off more of their week. Neither request lasts long. The better request is for a shortlist that takes fewer conversations to resolve, which means asking the first screen to carry more of the weight. That is where the 43 days can actually shrink, before the manager is ever involved.

Ready to transform your hiring strategy? Schedule a Demo with our founders today!