What 44 days actually costs you

The most widely quoted time-to-fill figure in the industry right now is 44 days for a professional role — published by the Josh Bersin Company in their 2024 talent acquisition benchmark, drawing on data from roughly 800 employers across North America and Europe. Other sources place the number slightly higher or lower, but 40–47 days is the typical range for a mid-to-senior knowledge-work role in 2024–25.

Forty-four days is long enough that most hiring managers have stopped flinching at it. It's also long enough to hide a material cost that almost nobody adds up properly. Here is the version of the number that actually matters.

Step one: the unit cost of a day

Start with the fully-loaded cost of the role you're hiring for, not just the base salary. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks this directly in its Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release: total compensation for a private-sector professional worker averaged $64.59 per hour in Q4 2024, of which wages accounted for $43.93 and benefits for $20.66. Full release at bls.gov/news.release/ecec.nr0.htm.

For a role billed at a $120k fully-loaded cost — roughly the midpoint for a senior engineer, product manager, or operations lead — one working day costs you about $460. The number varies by seniority and geography, but the order of magnitude is the same everywhere.

Step two: multiply by output, not by cost

Here's where most teams underestimate the number. Replacing the cost of a missing person overstates it, because the salary isn't being paid during the vacancy. Replacing the output of a missing person understates it, because the team is carrying the work of the empty seat as well as their own.

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) cites a commonly-used estimate that vacant senior roles drag team productivity by roughly 15% on the surrounding function for the duration of the vacancy, rising higher for leadership roles where the empty seat blocks decisions. That's a blended number, not a law of physics, but it's the one most TA benchmark reports converge on. See the SHRM Talent Acquisition benchmark at shrm.org/topics-tools/research.

The 44-day number, converted

Take a senior role with a $120k fully-loaded cost, supporting a team of five other people at similar cost. Apply a 15% productivity drag across the team for the 44 days the seat is open. That's 5 × $460 × 0.15 × 44 ≈ $15,180 in lost team output during the search. Add the direct vacancy cost (the work not being done by the missing person, estimated conservatively at 60% of their own cost for the vacancy period) and you get another 0.6 × $460 × 44 ≈ $12,144.

Total drag from a 44-day search on one senior role: roughly $27,000 in pure output loss, before you count any of the second-order effects — deals that didn't ship, roadmap items that slipped, team members who had to cover. Pull the search time down to 22 days and you cut the number in half. Push it out to 66 days and you've lost over $40,000 of output before the offer even lands.

What to do with this number

Two things. First, stop treating search time as a free resource. A search that runs a month longer than it needs to is an unbudgeted five-figure cost in most teams, and a six-figure cost in senior ones. Second, when you evaluate a specialist firm, ask them what their median time from engaged brief to calibrated shortlist looks like. If they can't answer, or the number is vague, the answer is long.

For what it's worth: our internal median on retained mandates in 2024–25 sat at 10 working days from brief to calibrated shortlist. That's the number we operate to, and we'll show it on a call.

Sources: Josh Bersin Company 2024 Talent Acquisition Benchmark; U.S. BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation Q4 2024 release; SHRM Talent Acquisition research. Calculations are illustrative — run them against your own fully-loaded cost numbers for a defensible internal figure.