After nearly 20 years in human resources and hiring, I have developed a healthy respect for one deceptively simple number: time-to-fill. It sounds like an HR statistic, something that belongs on a recruiting dashboard alongside cost-per-hire and turnover. In reality, time-to-fill is a business metric. Every day a position remains vacant, someone is paying for it. Maybe it is the production manager working another shift, the sales team trying to cover an empty territory, employees working overtime, HVAC customers waiting longer for service, or an owner wondering why an important project keeps getting pushed back. A vacant position is not free simply because the payroll line is temporarily empty.
That reality is particularly important for Nebraska employers in 2026. Nebraska's unemployment rate stood at 2.9 percent in July, compared with 4.1 percent nationally, with more than 1.09 million people in the state's labor force. The Nebraska Department of Labor describes the state's labor market as resilient, and the numbers support that assessment. In a labor market this tight, employers cannot assume that a qualified candidate will patiently wait while an organization moves through an elaborate hiring process. Good candidates have options, and options create competition.
The latest research from SHRM puts some useful numbers around this problem. Its 2026 Recruiting Executives Benchmarking report found that median time-to-fill for nonexecutive positions has fallen to 39 calendar days, while executive time-to-fill has remained essentially unchanged. SHRM also found that executive cost-per-hire increased while nonexecutive costs remained relatively stable. Those numbers should make every HR leader stop and think. Thirty-nine days may be a reasonable benchmark, but a benchmark is not a business strategy. A position that costs an organization $500 a day in lost productivity, overtime, delayed revenue or operational disruption has already cost $19,500 by the time that “average” vacancy reaches 39 days.
And there is another uncomfortable reality: candidates are interviewing the employer while the employer is interviewing them. HRCI recently highlighted candidate experience, AI in hiring and the importance of staying current with recruiting practices as central issues for today's HR professionals. HRCI has also previously pointed to research showing a significant disconnect between HR processes and candidate expectations, including research from the Human Capital Institute indicating that 60 percent of candidates reported having a negative hiring experience. That should concern us. A candidate who receives an application confirmation immediately, hears from a recruiter within a day or two, knows what the next step is and receives timely feedback experiences an organization very differently from a candidate who submits an application and disappears into a black hole.
This is where I believe HR sometimes gets itself into trouble. We become so focused on building a defensible process that we forget that the process itself communicates something about the organization. A hiring process can communicate competence, urgency, organization and respect. It can also communicate bureaucracy, indecision and indifference. Adding another interview, another approval or another assessment does not automatically make a hiring decision better. Sometimes it simply makes the decision slower.
There is a fundamental difference between using a process to improve hiring decisions and using a process to avoid making decisions. The first is good HR. The second is organizational paralysis disguised as rigor.
SHRM's research provides a fascinating real-world example. In a 2026 case study, MSI used technology and process redesign to dramatically compress portions of its recruiting cycle. For one driver position, the time between creating a candidate profile and scheduling a phone screen fell from six days to less than one day. The time from candidate profile creation to an onsite interview dropped from 15 days to fewer than three. The lesson is not that every company needs to interview someone in three days. The lesson is that organizations should relentlessly examine where time is actually being spent.
That distinction becomes even more important because not every job should be recruited the same way. A company experiencing constant turnover in an entry-level or high-volume position needs a fundamentally different recruiting model than a company searching for a chief executive officer. A manufacturing organization hiring 30 production employees needs speed, accessibility and a process designed for volume. A hospital searching for a specialized clinician may need a relationship-driven approach that begins months before a vacancy occurs. A company recruiting a CEO may appropriately spend weeks or months assessing leadership capability, cultural alignment, references and long-term strategic fit.
The mistake is assuming that one hiring process can serve all three situations equally well.
In my experience, the best HR departments understand that the goal isn't simply to “weed people out.” The goal is to identify the people the organization should be excited about hiring. That requires judgment. It requires communication. It requires recruiters and hiring managers who understand the labor market and who are willing to move when they find someone exceptional.
This becomes especially important as artificial intelligence and automation change recruiting. Technology can help organizations sort applications, schedule interviews, communicate with candidates and identify potential matches. But technology can also make recruiting feel cold and mechanical. SHRM has warned about the increasingly impersonal nature of recruiting as AI-generated applications and automated recruiting systems become more prevalent. The irony is that as technology makes it easier to process candidates, human communication may become more valuable, not less.
For Nebraska employers, this is an opportunity. We have a workforce that remains remarkably strong, and that means companies have to compete for people rather than simply wait for applicants to appear. The organization that responds quickly, communicates honestly, explains the opportunity clearly and treats candidates like human beings has a competitive advantage that cannot be purchased simply by adding another recruiting technology.
After almost two decades in HR, I would encourage Nebraska business leaders to stop asking only, “What is our average time-to-fill?” Ask instead, “What is this vacancy costing us every day?” Ask, “How long are our candidates waiting for us?” Ask, “Which parts of our process actually improve the quality of our hiring decisions?” And perhaps most importantly, ask, “Are we hiring differently for positions that have fundamentally different business consequences?”
Hiring faster does not mean hiring recklessly. It means understanding that speed, quality and candidate experience are not enemies. Done correctly, they reinforce one another.
In Nebraska's 2026 labor market, the employer who wins the candidate may not be the company with the largest HR department, the most sophisticated applicant tracking system or the longest interview process. Sometimes the winning company is simply the one that recognizes a great candidate, picks up the phone and says, “We'd really like to talk with you.”