A real number for your role and industry, built from 6.2 million sourcing sequences sent in 2025, 54 million applications and US government hiring data. Every rate shows the source behind it. No sign-up.
Median days from the job going live to a candidate accepting, measured in your industry rather than across all of them.
Entry and support roles: 41 days
Specialists and experts: 41 days
Technical and skilled roles: 48 days
Middle management: 47 days
Senior management: 54 days
Executive: 51 days
Dataset: Over 160,000 hires across the previous three years. Time to fill is measured from the job going live to candidate acceptance.
Source: Pinpoint, RecruitmentTrends: time to fill by industryThis divides the open roles counted on the last business day of the month by average monthly hires, so it reads as roughly how many months of hiring it would take to clear the current stock of openings. A high figure means employers are posting faster than they can fill. It is an adjustment rather than a measured sourcing rate, which is why it is shown separately and can be switched off.
Without it, the same funnel gives 469 candidates per hire. With it, 469 x 0.93 = 438.
Dataset: Seasonally adjusted hires and job openings by industry, 12 months through July 2026, retrieved from the BLS public API. July is preliminary and earlier months are revised, so treat these as a dated snapshot rather than live figures.
Series: JTS510000000000000HIL (hires) and JTS510000000000000JOL (openings), via https://api.bls.gov/publicAPI/v1/timeseries/data/
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS)Mid-level roles take a median of 63 days.
A deadline shorter than the benchmark does not make the funnel convert better, it just raises the weekly outreach you need. That is the number worth arguing over in a kick-off meeting.
Metric: median time to first fill
Dataset: 54 million applications across 93,000 jobs, January 2021 to March 2026.
Source: Ashby, Talent Trends Report: Recruiting Operations BenchmarksGem measured a cumulative 8.8% reply rate after one email, 13.7% after two and 16.3% after three, on 6.2 million sequences sent in 2025. The second email is the single biggest gain. Ashby and Lever both found the same shape on earlier data, and all three agree a fourth email adds very little.
Sending three emails instead of one roughly halves the number of people you need to contact. No other input on this page moves the answer that far, and it costs nothing but follow-up.
Dataset: Over 500,000 sourcing email sequences sent through Ashby, January 2022 to January 2024.
Source: Ashby, Talent Trends Report: Candidate SourcingCorroborating dataset: Anonymised metadata from over 2,500 customers, 1 January to 31 December 2018.
Source: Lever, 2019 Talent Benchmarks ReportAshby publishes interview passthrough rates blended across every source: 35% at the recruiter screen, 24% at the loop, 81% offer acceptance. Those are dominated by inbound applicants and lifted by referrals and internal moves. Chain them and you get 168 candidates per hire.
Gem measures the same stages on outbound candidates alone and finds them harder: they clear the first screen at 86% because a sourcer already vetted them, then convert at 18% to the loop, 22% to an offer and 73% to a hire. That is a 2.5% application-to-hire rate against 0.3% for inbound. Since this tool is about cold outbound, it uses the outbound numbers, which is why its answer is larger.
The chain reproduces Gem's own published checkpoints: 8.6% converted to process, against the 8% Gem states, and 2.5% application to hire, against the 2.5% Gem states.
Dataset: 165 million applications, 15 million candidates and 1.2 million hires, June 2021 to May 2025.
Source: Gem, 2026 Recruiting Benchmarks Report (PDF)Gem publishes both years and labels the change itself: 22.6% in 2024 against 16.9% in 2025. That is a documented decline, not a disagreement between sources. This tool uses the 2025 figure rather than the more flattering older one.
hireEZ's 15.2% is measured per message rather than per sequence, so it is not directly comparable with the others and is shown for context only.
23% — Gem, June 2024 to May 2025, outbound candidates
19.6% — Ashby, January 2022 to January 2024
16.9% — Gem, calendar 2025, the figure this tool uses
15.2% — hireEZ, January to June 2025
Ashby reports little variation by industry, but its customer base is almost entirely venture-backed software. hireEZ measured a much broader base in the first half of 2025 and found a two-fold spread. If you recruit outside technology, expect the reply step to be worse than the default here.
Information technology: 25%
Communication services: 22%
Industrials: 22%
Health care: 12%
Professional and commercial services: 12%
The tool does not apply these automatically, because the market adjustment already carries an industry signal and applying both would count it twice. Use the override below instead.
Your own conversion rates always beat a benchmark. Enter any stage as a percentage and the whole calculation follows it. Leave a field empty to keep the published figure.
How many candidates to source: Engineering in Information (media, telecoms, software publishing)
Source 438 candidates per hire.
For 3 hires: 1,314 candidates.
Pipeline for one hire:
Candidates to source: 438
Replies to your outreach: 79
Reply is positive: 44
Enters your process: 38
Passes the first screen: 32
Reaches the interview loop: 6
Gets an offer: 1
Accepts the offer: 1
Rates used:
Replies to your outreach: 18.1% (Reply rate, Gem, Email Outreach Benchmarks (2026))
Reply is positive: 55.6% (Interested rate, Gem, Email Outreach Benchmarks (2026))
Enters your process: 85.1% (Converted to process, Gem, 2026 Recruiting Benchmarks (2026))
Passes the first screen: 86% (Application to pre-onsite, outbound, Gem, 2026 Recruiting Benchmarks (2026))
Reaches the interview loop: 18% (Pre-onsite to onsite, outbound, Gem, 2026 Recruiting Benchmarks (2026))
Gets an offer: 22% (Onsite to offer, outbound, Gem, 2026 Recruiting Benchmarks (2026))
Accepts the offer: 73% (Offer to hire, outbound, Gem, 2026 Recruiting Benchmarks (2026))
Market adjustment: 0.93x. Information (media, telecoms, software publishing) has 1.27 open roles per hire against a US average of 1.365, from BLS JOLTS data through July 2026.
Sequence: a typical sequence (blended average) (18.1% reply rate).
Pace: 146 candidates sourced per week over 63 days (29 per working day). Median time to first fill for mid level roles is 63 days.
Cross-check: Gem measures outbound candidates at 2.5% application-to-hire, which puts the same outreach at 371 candidates per hire. Published sequence reply rates span 15.2% to 23%, so treat this as a range.
Sources:
Ashby, Talent Trends Report: Candidate Sourcing (2024): https://www.ashbyhq.com/talent-trends-report/reports/candidate-sourcing
Ashby, Talent Trends Report: Recruiting Operations Benchmarks (2026): https://www.ashbyhq.com/talent-trends-report/reports/recruiting-operations-benchmarks-talent-trends
Gem, 2026 Recruiting Benchmarks Report (2026): https://lp.gem.com/rs/972-IVV-330/images/eBook%20-%202026%20Benchmarks%20Report%20-%20Final.pdf
Gem, Email outreach for recruiters: 2026 benchmarks and best practices (2026): https://lp.gem.com/rs/972-IVV-330/images/Email%20Outreach%20Benchmarks%20Report%202026.pdf
hireEZ, 2025 email outreach benchmark report (2025): https://explore.hireez.com/hubfs/eBook-pdf/2025-email-outreach-benchmark-report.pdf
Lever, 2019 Talent Benchmarks Report (2019): https://lever-assets.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/hire/Benchmarking_the_Industry_2019_Report.pdf
Pinpoint, RecruitmentTrends: time to fill by industry (2026): https://trends.pinpointhq.com/industry-time-to-fill
US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) (2026): https://www.bls.gov/jlt/Over 500,000 sourcing email sequences sent through Ashby, January 2022 to January 2024.
https://www.ashbyhq.com/talent-trends-report/reports/candidate-sourcing54 million applications across 93,000 jobs, January 2021 to March 2026.
https://www.ashbyhq.com/talent-trends-report/reports/recruiting-operations-benchmarks-talent-trends165 million applications, 15 million candidates and 1.2 million hires, June 2021 to May 2025.
https://lp.gem.com/rs/972-IVV-330/images/eBook%20-%202026%20Benchmarks%20Report%20-%20Final.pdf6.2 million email sequences and 15.5 million messages sent through Gem in calendar 2025.
https://lp.gem.com/rs/972-IVV-330/images/Email%20Outreach%20Benchmarks%20Report%202026.pdfOver 2.7 million recruiting emails sent January to June 2025.
https://explore.hireez.com/hubfs/eBook-pdf/2025-email-outreach-benchmark-report.pdfAnonymised metadata from over 2,500 customers, 1 January to 31 December 2018.
https://lever-assets.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/hire/Benchmarking_the_Industry_2019_Report.pdfOver 160,000 hires across the previous three years. Time to fill is measured from the job going live to candidate acceptance.
https://trends.pinpointhq.com/industry-time-to-fillSeasonally adjusted hires and job openings by industry, 12 months through July 2026, retrieved from the BLS public API. July is preliminary and earlier months are revised, so treat these as a dated snapshot rather than live figures.
https://www.bls.gov/jlt/“How many candidates do we need?” usually gets answered with a number someone half remembers. The real answer is a chain of conversion rates, and each link has been measured on a large dataset. Source a hundred people and about twenty reply. Fewer than half of those replies are a yes. Of the people who start the process, roughly a third pass the recruiter screen, a quarter get through the interview loop, almost everyone clears final checks, and about four in five accept the offer.
Multiply the chain and you land near 200 sourced candidates per hire for a typical role. That number is not a guess, and it is not ours: it comes from Ashby’s analysis of more than 500,000 sourcing sequences and 54 million applications, cross-checked against Gem’s 1.2 million hires. The calculator shows every link, and you can open each one to see the metric, the dataset and the source.
The stage that varies most is the first one. Ashby measured a 42% reply rate for legal and recruiting candidates, 21% for engineers and 20% for finance, against a 19.6% average. Engineers receive the most sourcing outreach of any group and open the least of it, so an engineering search can need twice the volume of a legal one to produce the same hire. Those role figures are from 2022 to 2024, so the tool applies the ratio between them to today’s baseline rather than reusing the old absolute numbers.
Of everything on the page, the input that changes the answer most is not the role or the industry. It is how many emails are in your sequence. Gem measured a cumulative 8.8% reply rate after one email, 13.7% after two and 16.3% after three, across 6.2 million sequences sent in 2025. The second email is the single biggest gain. Sources differ on where the returns stop: Gem puts the optimum at four emails, while Lever measured gains continuing to six on 2018 data.
Sending three emails instead of one roughly halves the number of people you need to contact. A recruiter who sends one email and gives up is doing about twice the sourcing work for the same hire.
Conversion rates describe your process. They say nothing about whether every other employer is chasing the same people. For that the calculator uses the US Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLTS release, which reports actual hires and unfilled openings by industry every month. Dividing openings by hires gives a plain measure of how far demand runs ahead of what the industry can fill.
The tool applies that ratio as a clearly labelled multiplier, shows the raw hires and openings behind it, names the exact BLS series so you can pull the data yourself, and lets you switch it off. It is the one figure that is an adjustment rather than a measured sourcing rate, so it is never folded in silently.
The most useful moment for this number is the kick-off meeting. A hiring manager who wants three engineers this quarter is asking for several hundred sourced candidates, a few hundred outreach replies and a dozen interview loops. Showing that chain, with citations, turns “why is this taking so long?” into a conversation about capacity. Copy the plan out of the tool and paste it into the intake doc.
When you have your own conversion rates, use them. Enter any stage as a percentage and the whole plan follows your data, with the drill-down marking which rates are yours. Then build the search itself with the Boolean Search String Builder, widen it with the Synonym Expander, and point it at public profiles with the X-ray Search Builder.
Paste a job ad and see what the evidence says is costing you applications, with the studies behind each check.
Paste the email you actually send and see what is costing you replies, scored against 6.2 million sequences.
Turn a role into a Google or Bing query that searches public profiles across eleven networks, including LinkedIn, GitHub and Google Scholar.
Knowing you need a few hundred candidates is the easy half. HeroHunt searches 1 billion+ profiles, screens every match against your role and runs the outreach, so the top of the funnel fills itself.
