In a recent update to Adzuna’s intelligence portal, our proprietary dashboard that displays a wide range of aggregate statistics based on all the vacancy listings we hold on our site, users can now access data relating to time to fill, the number of days it takes for a vacancy to be filled.
This is an important metric when it comes to recruitment, allowing HR professionals to understand how difficult it is to fill the different types of roles that their organisation recruits for. When considered at an aggregate level, this statistic can also provide insights to how well the labour market our sections of the labour market are functioning and how well the demand for and supply of labour are matched.
Time to fill trends
The chart below from August’s UK job market report shows how time to fill (the average duration of job postings in days) has evolved since we began collecting data in 2016.
The last few months have seen job vacancies being filled faster than at any time previously, with UK job postings remaining open for just 35.4 days on average in April 2023, down from 43.1 days on average a year prior.
The general trend for the average time taken to fill a role has been falling steadily since June 2022. This was the roughly the point at which, during the inactivity crisis we are currently facing, the inactivity rate peaked and the unemployment rate troughed, i.e., the point at which the labour market was its tightest. Meanwhile, the peak in time to fill since 2016 came during the early months of the pandemic – reaching 55.1 days on average in May 2020, up 15% from just three months prior on the eve of the pandemic.
Best and worst cities
Looking at this data across the last 6-months (January to July 2023), across the UK the average (median) time to fill a vacancy was 29 days, with a 25th percentile of 27 days and a 75th percentile of 34 days.
Across all of the regions of England, as well as several major cities including Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and Liverpool, the distribution of time to fill broadly follows this breakdown, aside from London where the 25th percentile and median figures are the same as for the UK, but the 75th percentile figure is much higher at 38 days. This may reflect a greater proportion of harder to fill vacancies in the capital where vacancies tend to have higher skill demands given the types of roles located there.
The 75th percentile figure is also higher in Scotland (37 days) than across the UK, driven by the large cities of Edinburgh (75th percentile time to fill = 38 days) and Glasgow (39) which may be due to similar issues as in London.
The other devolved nations also have a greater skew towards hard to fill roles than England as whole, particularly Northern Ireland which has a 75th percentile time to fill over the past 6 months of 41.
Top hiring industries
The chart below shows the 25th percentile, median and 75th percentile time to fill for vacancies by the industry of the listing employer, for the top ten hiring industries (descending from left to right) in the last 6 months across the UK.
There is clearly wide variation in the average time to fill vacancies by industry, as well as differences in the skew towards harder to fill vacancies. The financial and insurance activities industry (the sixth largest hiring industry) has by far the longest average time to fill vacancies (37 days), more than 10% longer than professional, scientific and technical activities industry (33 days) which is in second place, and these two industries also have the highest 75th percentile figures with the financial and insurance activities industry being a particular outlier. These are two industries that typically contain a large proportion of highly skilled, highly paid roles for which labour is relatively scarcer, and therefore it will take longer on average to fill any vacancies.
The table below then shows this data but for the top 10 most in demand Standard Occupational Classifications roles.
Table 1: Time to fill vacancies across top 10 most in demand Standard Occupational Classifications roles
| 25th percentile | Median | 75th percentile | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2134 Programmers and software development professionals | 27.0 | 30.0 | 42.0 |
| 2461 Social workers | 27.0 | 29.0 | 32.0 |
| 5434 Chefs | 27.0 | 29.0 | 38.0 |
| 3556 Sales accounts and business development managers | 27.0 | 29.0 | 39.0 |
| 7111 Sales and retail assistants | 26.0 | 30.0 | 41.0 |
| 2319 Teaching professionals n.e.c. | 27.0 | 29.0 | 30.0 |
| 2421 Chartered and certified accountants | 27.0 | 29.0 | 31.0 |
| 2237 Other nursing professionals | 27.0 | 29.0 | 32.0 |
| 2313 Secondary education teaching professionals | 27.0 | 29.0 | 30.0 |
| 6135 Care workers and home carers | 26.0 | 28.0 | 31.0 |
The 25th percentile and median figures as before are largely consistent across the occupations.
The two teaching occupations, 2319 Teaching professionals n.e.c. and 2313 Secondary education teaching professionals, are actually slightly skewed away from harder to fill roles – this might be because schools which hire these roles are less able to adjust their ‘output’ than other forms of organisations, and if they have roles that it is hard to find suitably qualified labour to fill, they will turn more quickly to other sources such as supply teachers and non-subject specialists for instance.
Meanwhile, the most in demand occupations – 2134 Programmers and software development professionals (75th percentile days to fill = 42), 5354 Chefs (38), 3556 Sales accounts and business development managers (39) and 7111 Sales and retail assistants (41) – are quite heavily skewed towards having a higher number of hard to fill roles, which will likely be functions of their high levels of demand (all of these roles), shortages in the specialist skill sets required to fill the roles (especially 2134 Programmers and software development professionals) and/ or low levels of pay/ quality of work (especially 7111 Sales and retail assistants).
The time to fill vacancies is thus a valuable data point – for employers and HR professionals to identify where they might face particularly large recruitment challenges, as well as for policy makers and labour market commentators as an indication of the health of the labour market.
In another blog examining the new features of the intelligence portal, we look at how labour market demand varies by workplace model – flexible vs remote vs non-remote roles – across geographies, industries and occupations.
Read more: Changing workplace models: Remote, on-site & flexible
Read more: Analysing the nation’s skills problem