Time-to-hire isn’t just an HR metric – it’s money on the table. In the scramble to scale a startup, every extra day a key role stays vacant is a day of lost productivity, stalled projects, and mounting pressure on your team. Yet many growing tech companies still slog through a 47.5-day hiring cycle when going it alone, versus about 31 days with a recruitment agency [1].
That two-week difference isn’t just a scheduling quirk – it’s a strategic advantage. Let’s unpack the time savings of agency hiring versus in-house, and why hiring faster isn’t just operationally helpful, but commercially critical for startups and scale-ups.
The Race Against the Clock: Context for Faster Hiring
Founders and hiring managers know that in the fast-paced world of tech and SaaS, vacant roles hurt. An empty seat can feel like an emergency brake on the business – projects stall, teammates shoulder extra work, and opportunities slip. Unfilled positions don’t just inconvenience your team, they cost real money in lost output.
According to one analysis, companies lose roughly $7,000–$10,000 (£5,300-£7,600) per month in revenue for every revenue-generating role left unfilled [2]. Even non-sales roles drag on growth: one Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) study pegs the average cost of a vacancy at $4,129 over 42 days [3]. In other words, every week a position stays open could mean thousands in unrealised productivity. Time really is money in hiring, and slow hiring is a silent revenue killer.
Agency vs In-House: Speed and Impact
Why are recruitment agencies quicker off the mark? It starts with focus and reach.
Internal HR teams often juggle hiring with a dozen other duties, whereas agencies live and breathe recruiting full-time. They proactively source candidates and often have qualified people queued up before a job even opens [4]. The result: agencies can present strong candidates faster, slashing time-to-fill. On average, businesses using an agency fill roles about 18% faster than in-house recruiting for typical positions [1]. For senior hires the gap is even more striking – filling an executive role internally takes around 68 days, whereas agencies average about 45 days [5], roughly 30% faster to the offer letter. That speed isn’t just for show. Fewer empty-chair days means less disruption and a quicker return to full productivity on your team [1][2]. At ABR Talent, the average time to hire a suitable candidate is 19 days.
From a practical standpoint, a faster hire can literally pay for itself. Imagine a key role sitting open for an extra three or four weeks in-house – that’s three or four weeks of goals unmet and revenue deferred. Recruitment agencies mitigate this by compressing those timelines. They tap into broad talent pools and mobilise quickly, so you’re not waiting months to backfill a crucial engineer or sales rep. In short, speed isn’t a ‘nice-to-have’, it’s a competitive edge. The sooner new talent is on board, the sooner they’re contributing to product releases, sales targets, or whatever moves your business forward. In the high-speed startup arena, hiring delays can mean missed market windows; agencies help you seize the moment instead of playing catch-up.
Access to Passive Talent: Tapping the 70%
One big reason agencies fill roles faster is their access to passive candidates – the talented folks who aren’t actively applying to your job posts but could be coaxed for the right opportunity. These “not looking but open to it” professionals make up about 70% of the global workforce [6]. If you’re only relying on incoming applications, you’re fishing in just 30% of the talent pool.
Agencies, by contrast, spend their days networking, headhunting, and maintaining relationships with candidates before jobs open. They often know who to call the moment a role needs filling, rather than starting from scratch. This proactive pipeline means less time spent waiting for applicants and more time interviewing high-calibre people who weren’t even on your radar. It’s like having a talent heat-seeking missile – recruiters can pinpoint skilled candidates who would never appear via a career site submission. By reaching deep into the passive market, agencies significantly speed up the hiring process while also improving quality of hire, since you’re getting the best person available, not just the best who applied.
Agencies also leverage pipeline building as a core strategy [4][7]. Great recruiters don’t wait for a vacancy to occur; they continuously engage with potential candidates in your industry, keeping warm lists of prospects. So when your startup secures that new round of funding and suddenly needs a product lead yesterday, an agency recruiter likely already has a shortlist of qualified names ready to contact. In-house teams can and do build pipelines too, but agencies make it an art form – it’s part of their value proposition. This always-on sourcing approach means less scrambling and more landing.
The Commercial Cost of Slow Hiring: Insight and Impact
We tend to think of faster hiring as an operational win – less work piling up, less recruiter fatigue. But it’s also a financial win. Every week shaved off your hiring timeline is a week sooner that a new salesperson is closing deals or a new developer is shipping features. Conversely, every extra week of vacancy is a tangible loss. For a rough example, consider a vacant mid-level role that might be worth £100k in annual value to your company (through the revenue or output they generate). Leaving that seat empty for an extra month could cost you around £8,000 in lost output (very roughly £2k per week) – and for higher-level roles, the losses escalate toward £5k or more per week in value not created. Now multiply that across multiple open roles, and the opportunity cost becomes eye-watering. This is why hiring speed isn’t just an HR efficiency metric; it’s a business-critical KPI.
Recruitment agencies directly address this by accelerating the cycle. A faster hire shrinks the cost-of-vacancy window, saving potentially tens of thousands in foregone revenue or productivity [2][5]. As a Forbes report highlighted, when agencies fill a leadership role quicker, it can save a company significant money that would’ve been lost in those unproductive days [2]. For lean startups especially, closing talent gaps 2–3 weeks sooner can be the difference between hitting this quarter’s targets or falling short. It also spares your existing team from weeks of overload, protecting morale and preventing burnout (which itself has cost implications down the line). In short, speedy hiring keeps the business engine humming – work doesn’t get stuck in limbo, and teams can maintain momentum.
Takeaway: Speed as a Competitive Advantage
At the end of the day, recruitment speed isn’t just about bragging rights or moving fast for the sake of it. It’s about making smarter business decisions.
Using a recruitment agency can turn hiring speed into a strategic advantage – you plug talent gaps faster, reduce the expensive downtime of open roles, and tap into candidates your in-house efforts might miss entirely. For founders and hiring managers in tech, SaaS, or go-to-market teams, the message is clear: hiring fast means driving revenue and innovation faster too. The next time you’re weighing agency vs. DIY hiring, remember that those saved 16 or 23 days are more than calendar trivia – they’re days your new hire could be pushing the business forward. In the race to build a successful company, time saved is not just time earned, but value earned. And in hiring, as in startups, every day counts.
References
[1] Wicked Staffing Solutions (2024), “Agency vs Internal Hiring: Time-to-Fill Benchmarks,” WickedStaffing.com
[2] Forbes (2023), “The Real Cost of a Vacancy in Your Business,” Forbes.com
[3] SHRM (2022), “Cost of Vacancy Benchmarks,” Society for Human Resource Management
[4] Interex Group (2024), “The Talent Pool Advantage: Why Agencies Hire Faster,” Interex-group.com
[5] Talentuch (2022), “Time-to-Hire: Internal vs Agency Comparison,” Talentuch.com
[6] LinkedIn Talent Solutions (2023), “The Global Talent Trends Report,” business.linkedin.com
[7] BountyJobs (2023), “Pipeline Playbooks for Recruiters,” bountyjobs.com
