How this instrument works
Recruiting time rarely gets estimated before a hiring round starts — teams plan the number of roles, not the hours behind them. But every stage of a funnel has a real per-candidate cost: a few minutes to skim a CV, longer on the phone, much longer face-to-face, and a final round of offer conversations and reference checks. Multiply each of those by how many candidates actually reach that stage, and a hiring round that looks simple on a job board can quietly consume dozens of recruiter-hours before anyone signs an offer letter.
The arithmetic treats each stage as candidates times minutes-per-candidate, with one twist: interviews get multiplied by the number of rounds too, because a candidate who reaches the interview stage sits through every round you've defined, not just one. Add the CV stage, the phone stage, the (interviews x minutes x rounds) stage, and the offer stage together, convert the total from minutes to hours, and divide by the number of recruiters splitting the work to get an even per-person figure.
This is a planning estimate, not a time-tracking log — it counts only the four funnel stages you enter (screening, phone, interview, offer) and assumes recruiters split the whole workload evenly. It doesn't account for sourcing candidates in the first place, scheduling friction, hiring-manager time, or the unpaid hours candidates themselves put into interview prep — all real costs that sit outside this specific calculation.
- Enter how many CVs you expect to screen and the average minutes you'll spend reviewing each one.
- Enter how many candidates move to a phone screen and the average minutes per call.
- Enter how many candidates reach a full interview, minutes per interview, and how many rounds each of them goes through.
- Enter how many candidates receive an offer and the minutes needed per offer discussion, including reference checks.
- Set how many recruiters are sharing this hiring round's workload.
- Read total process hours and the hours-per-recruiter figure below.
Worked example — a 50-CV mid-size hiring round
A hiring team screens 50 CVs at 5 minutes each (250 minutes), phone-screens 20 of them at 15 minutes each (300 minutes), interviews 8 finalists through 2 rounds at 45 minutes per round (8×45×2 = 720 minutes), and extends 3 offers at 30 minutes each for the discussion and reference checks (90 minutes).
Adding the four stages gives 250 + 300 + 720 + 90 = 1,360 minutes, or 1,360 ÷ 60 = 22.67 total process hours. Split across 2 recruiters sharing this round, that's 22.67 ÷ 2 = 11.33 hours of screening-and-interviewing work each — nearly a full and a half working days per person, before either recruiter has touched sourcing, scheduling, or paperwork.
Questions
Why does the interview stage multiply minutes by rounds?
Because every candidate who reaches the interview stage sits through all of your defined rounds, not just one. If 8 candidates each go through 2 rounds of 45-minute interviews, that's 8 × 45 × 2 = 720 minutes of interviewer time, not 8 × 45 — the round count compounds the same way an extra day of work would for each candidate still in the pipeline.
Does this include sourcing candidates or scheduling time?
No. It covers exactly four funnel stages — CV screening, phone screens, interview rounds, and offer/reference-check calls — because those are the stages with a fairly predictable per-candidate time cost. Sourcing, calendar coordination, hiring-manager debriefs, and paperwork after an offer is accepted all add real hours on top of this total; treat the result as the screening-and-interviewing core of a hiring round, not its full cost.
How can I lower hours per recruiter without cutting corners?
The two levers that don't touch candidate quality are adding recruiters to split the same total, or trimming minutes at stages that don't need as long as they're currently getting — a shorter structured phone screen, for instance, often filters as well as a long unstructured one. Cutting the number of CVs screened or interview rounds does lower the number, but it's a scope change, not an efficiency gain, so it's worth knowing which lever you're actually pulling.
What's a realistic number of minutes per CV screen?
Reported figures vary widely depending on what is being measured: a fast first-pass keyword scan is often described as taking well under a minute (some widely cited figures put it at just seconds), while a fuller read of a shortlisted CV commonly runs a few minutes. If your process is a genuine read-through rather than a quick scan, 2 to 5 minutes per CV is a reasonable planning figure; for a fast initial scan, enter a much smaller number instead.
Why divide the total by recruiters at the end instead of per stage?
Splitting the grand total assumes the team shares the whole funnel as a pool of work rather than each recruiter owning one stage end-to-end — a common setup for small teams. If your team instead assigns one recruiter to CV screening and another to interviews, compute each stage's hours separately and assign them directly instead of averaging; the total-hours figure this calculator returns is still useful as a sanity check on the round's overall size.