Why "Time to Offer" Is the Wrong Metric for Tech Hiring - And What to Track Instead
Every procurement team tracks time-to-offer. It's clean, quantifiable, and sits neatly in a VMS dashboard. It also has almost no correlation with the outcome that actually matters: whether the person you hired is still there, delivering value, six months later.
I've spent years on both sides of this equation - running hiring programmes and advising the enterprises that commission them. The single most consistent failure pattern I see is optimising the front of the funnel while neglecting everything that determines the actual ROI of a hire.
"Speed to offer is a vendor efficiency metric. It tells you how fast we move. It tells you nothing about whether we moved in the right direction."
The Metric That Looks Right but Isn't
Time-to-offer became the standard hiring KPI for understandable reasons. It's measurable, it's controllable, and it creates a clear accountability line between a talent partner and a programme manager. When a position has been open for 90 days, everyone feels the urgency.
The problem is that urgency and quality are in direct tension - and every system optimised for urgency will systematically sacrifice quality, usually invisibly. The candidate looks right on paper. The screening call went fine. The hiring manager liked them in the interview. The offer goes out in 22 days. Six weeks after joining, they've put in their papers.
What Actually Predicts Hiring Success
1. Quality-to-Shortlist Ratio
Of all profiles submitted by a talent partner, what percentage does the hiring manager actually want to interview? Industry average: 25-35%. FYRE™-driven shortlists: measurably higher than keyword-filtered shortlists. This single metric tells you whether your talent partner is screening or just forwarding resumes.
2. Time-to-Productivity (TTP)
How long does it take a new hire to be independently productive in role? This is determined by how deeply the role was understood at the intake stage. Roles filled with a thorough discovery process consistently show measurably faster time-to-productivity than those filled on speed-optimised timelines.
3. 90-Day Retention Rate
The most ruthless proxy for fit quality. If a hire exits within 90 days, almost every time it's a fit failure - not a personal failure. Either the role was misrepresented, the candidate was mis-screened, or the onboarding didn't bridge the gap between expectation and reality.
The Intake Conversation You're Probably Not Having
Most talent partners receive a JD and start sourcing. Some ask a few clarifying questions. Very few invest 45-60 minutes with a hiring manager to understand what "success in this role" actually looks like - what domain context matters, what failure modes have burned them before, what the team dynamics are.
At Qfyre, we call this the Fit Discovery session. It happens before a single search query is run. We share a written Role Discovery Brief summarising our understanding - and ask you to validate it before we source. This single document prevents most hiring failures before they happen.
The Practical Shift: What to Track Starting Monday
- Replace "time to first submittal" with "quality ratio of first submittal" as your primary vendor scorecard metric
- Add 90-day retention as a contractual SLA with replacement obligations - not just a nice-to-have
- Require a Role Discovery Brief from every talent partner before sourcing begins
- Track time-to-productivity in your onboarding data, not just time-to-join
These four changes cost nothing to implement. They will tell you more about your talent partners in 60 days than three years of time-to-offer data ever will.
"The question is not how fast can you fill the seat. The question is how long will the right person stay in it."