The Average Time it Takes to Hire a Software Developer in Canada

If you’re a software developer in Canada looking for a job, you’re going to be thrilled because the tech sector in the country is booming with opportunities galore. This situation won’t change anytime soon as it’s a major economic driver that continues to grow (as the world gets ever so close towards a digital economy). But you won’t be happy with how long it takes to get hired in the region.

It’s not just limited to Canada though, as workers in several countries like the U.S., U.K., Australia, France, and Germany are also experiencing similar timelines. The Glassdoor’s Chief Economist, Dr. Andrew Chamberlain conducted a study where he analyzed 34,000 interview reviews that were submitted to the website. Further, the study covered 74,000 unique job titles (although not all in tech) with over 62,000 employers.

The study identified that the more complex the job was, the longer it took to get hired. In the U.S., it took about 22.9 days for most jobs, but complex jobs took much longer to fill. So it’s no surprise that most tech jobs took longer than the average period to complete the hiring process.

In Canada, those looking for a new job took approximately 16 weeks (or 4 months) to get hired (however there are no specific statistics for tech jobs). South of the border in America, the average time to hire for tech positions that had at least 30 interview reviews are as follows:

Senior Applications Developer: 28.3 days
Financial Software (FinTech) Developer: 19.9 days
Web Applications Developer: 23.5 days
iOS Developer: 14.1 days
Java Developer: 12.5 days
.NET Developer: 14.0 days
Software Engineer: 35 days
Hardware Engineer: 27.0 days
Product Engineer: 28.1 days
QA Engineer: 17.9 days
Junior Software Engineer: 15.7 days
Data Engineer: 25.8 days
Data Scientist: 23.2 days
Implementation Specialist: 27.8 days
Quality Assurance: 25.9 days
Database Administrator: 25.5 days
UX Designer: 19.3 days
Web Designer: 12.3 days
QA Tester: 13.9 days

What’s interesting here is that the time to hire for iOS developers, Java, and .NET was quite lower than the national average. But it makes sense as these developers are very much in demand, so taking a long time to screen may mean losing the candidate to a competitor.

The Average Time to Hire has been on the Rise Globally

According to the Glassdoor’s study, the average time to hire (TTH) has been on the rise since 2010. In the U.S. alone, the average TTH in 2010 was 12.6 days, so that’s an 80% increase over a five-year period. Further, it was a similar timeline when it came to hiring in Canada, reflecting the fact that the job interview process had grown longer in recent years.

The size of the industry also has an impact on how long it takes to hire a candidate. The larger the company, the longer it takes to hire across several countries. According to research, companies in the U.S. with employees in the 5,000 to 100,000 range took the longest at over 25 days (companies with 10 to 50 employees took the shortest time at 15 days).

Blame it all on Screening Tests

Regardless of variables like industry, location, and company size, the chief culprit behind the increased time to hire is screening tests. These can range from background checks, skills tests, personality tests, and drug tests.

Each one of these tests would add a significant amount of time to the whole interview process (sometimes adding a whole week).

Over the coming weeks, it will be interesting to see how the political climate in the U.S. will impact the hiring process when it comes to software developers. Could a larger talent pool mean longer time to hire? Or would turn into a race to snap up the best minds in the world?

By the way, at Digi117 we source from an exclusive national and international pool of fresh IT talent with new resumes added daily and which is not seen elsewhere by other local agencies. That's a pool of pre-qualified specialists who are readily available for onsite placement in Canada upon your request. Our promise is to shorten your time to hire to 2 weeks or even less!