Can you wait 49 days? Why getting hired takes so long in engineering

Richard Wang has hired at least 220 people in his career, and you won’t see him dawdling over roles such as customer service. For those jobs, he says, “you get a feeling on the first or second interview if this is the right person.”

But it’s a different story when Wang’s company needs software engineers for critical roles. In those situations, nobody rushes. 

Four or five rounds of engineering interviews are typical, says Wang, who is chief executive of Coding Dojo, a tech-training company. Those extra steps help his company be extra sure that it’s hiring people with the right technical skills and culture fit. “You can’t have a world-class company without world-class people,” Wang explains. 

Look across the U.S. economy, and you can find echoes of Coding Dojo’s multi-speed hiring philosophy everywhere. Technical positions in engineering, research and finance take a long time to fill -- even if the winning candidate is already in the mix. By contrast, everything moves faster in non-technical fields such as sales and customer service.

A comprehensive study by LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team shows how big this schism in hiring timelines can be. The data in the chart below is based on an analysis of 400,000 confirmed hires on the LinkedIn platform, involving candidates who applied for jobs from June 2020 to March 2021.

In each case, the clock starts ticking on the day that candidates submit their applications to the company that ultimately hires them. What follows next are all the usual steps of phone screenings, setting up in-person interviews and perhaps returning for more interviews. 

The job-hunter’s quest isn’t considered complete until a job offer arrives, is accepted -- and translates into a genuine Day One on the new job. So if candidates take some personal time before beginning a new job, or need to give the standard two weeks’ notice to their previous employers, that will stretch out timelines, too. Start dates then are identified when LinkedIn members update their profiles. (See methodology section below for more details.)

So what causes various engineering disciplines -- software, mechanical, electrical, civil and more -- to be the slowest-to-hire sector covered by LinkedIn’s analysis?

A savvy perspective comes from tech executive Molly Graham, a 14-year veteran of the Silicon Valley tech scene. Her bio includes stints at Google and Facebook, as well as experience in a variety of smaller startups. Currently, she’s chief operating officer of Lambda School, an online coding academy.

“Companies in the tech industry tend to value precision -- sometimes false precision -- over speed,” Graham observes. That can mean putting candidates through endless technical interviews, assessing deep textbook knowledge that’s far beyond what jobs may require. “Particularly in early stage companies,” she adds, those processes are often disorganized, creating a poor candidate experience.” 

Even when companies try to do the right thing, that can bring delays, she adds. Openings at well-regarded employers attract torrents of applications -- and it takes time to give each one even a momentary review. And as companies try to widen their talent pipelines to include more women and people of color, “that can be great for increasing the diversity of their workforce and also lead to a longer time to hire,” Graham says. 

Looking beyond tech, jobs that require interaction with many different stakeholders also can take a long time to fill. The median time-to-hire in product management is 47 days; for business development, it’s 46 days. 

The fastest median turnaround is for administrative jobs (33 days), with customer service (34 days) close behind.

LinkedIn’s analysis didn’t look at whether company size affects time-to-hire, but there’s academic research indicating that bigger organizations take longer. A 2014 report by University of Chicago economist Stephen Davis found that companies with 5,000 or more employees took an average of 58 days to hire, compared with a national average at the time of 25 days. 

How protracted can the hiring process become? LinkedIn’s tracking system has an upper cutoff of 90 days. In the engineering sector, the slowest 10% of hires are at 82 days, nearly hitting that cutoff. Delays aren’t unique to engineering, though. Even in faster-moving fields such as administration and customer service, the slowest 10% of hires can take 70 days or more.

And what about fortunate candidates whose hires happen rapidly? In engineering, the fastest 10% go from application to Day 1 in just 16 days. That’s nice, but it’s still languid compared to the fastest 10% of hires in administrative work. Those candidates can be on the payroll and starting work just eight days after submitting their application.

Methodology

Time-to-hire is calculated as the interval between the date of a job application on LinkedIn and the subsequent start date for that job, as posted on the applicant’s LinkedIn profile. Because these profiles provide only the starting month rather than the precise first day of the new position, time-to-hire counts the days between the application date and the first day of the starting month. Time-to-hire has a cap of 90 days. Any longer duration is excluded. .

Data scientists Caroline Liongosari, Zhujun (Allison) Chen, and Brian Xu contributed to this article.