(a) Time-to-fill is genuinely benchmarked. SHRM’s benchmarking data — real survey data from a professional body, not folklore — has for years put the average time-to-fill at roughly 36–44 days across all roles (the FY2015 Human Capital Benchmarking Report reported 42 days; SHRM’s 2025 Recruiting Benchmarking Report centres around ~44 days). The average conceals large role variation: high-volume/retail roles close in 15–25 days, while senior, technical, healthcare and engineering roles routinely exceed 60–90 days — SHRM’s 2025 data shows nearly 40% of senior-level roles take more than 90 days. Time-to-fill (requisition opened → offer accepted) should be distinguished from time-to-hire (candidate enters pipeline → offer accepted). Treat these as professional-body survey benchmarks — reliable directional ranges, but they are U.S.-weighted.

Canadian benchmark. Statistics Canada’s Job Vacancy and Wage Survey provides the closest Canadian analogue. It does not publish an average days-to-fill, but its long-term vacancy measure (recruitment ongoing 90 days or more) is instructive: 28.5% of Canadian vacancies were long-term in Q4 2025, a 4.1-point drop from 32.6% a year earlier. The national job vacancy rate held at 2.8% in Q4 2025 (for the third straight quarter, off the record 5.6% peak of Q2 2022), with 495,100 vacancies nationally in Q4 2025 (the lower ~467,000 figure was October 2025 alone) and 3.1 unemployed persons per vacancy (down from 3.2, the first quarterly decline since Q2 2022) — i.e., a looser, more employer-favourable hiring market in 2025–26 than during the 2022 crunch. For senior/specialized roles a K-W employer should plan on the 60–90+ day end.

(b) The dollar cost of a vacancy is largely estimated. Here the rigor drops sharply. Cost-of-vacancy is built from logic, not measurement: lost output of the empty seat, overtime/temporary coverage, management time, delayed projects, and (for revenue-attached roles) delayed or lost revenue. The figures that circulate — e.g., “$500 per day” for an ordinary role, or SHRM-attributed ranges of “$4,000–$9,000 per month,” and $7,000–$10,000/month for revenue-generating roles — are directional industry estimates, not audited costs, and should be labelled as such. The defensible way to compute it for a specific role is the vacancy-coverage method: divide the role’s fully-loaded annual cost (Note 2) by working days (~250) to get a daily value, then multiply by expected vacancy days; for revenue-attached roles, add the gross margin on the revenue the seat would have generated. Example: a $90k base / ~$117k fully-loaded role ÷ 250 ≈ $470/day; a 60-day senior vacancy ≈ $28,000 in coverage value alone, before lost revenue.

Bottom line / Ontario lens. Time-to-fill is industry-consensus (benchmarked, role-dependent, 36–44 days average / 60–90+ for senior). The dollar-per-day-vacant is directional — anchor it to the role’s own fully-loaded cost rather than a generic “$500/day.” A 20–200-person K-W employer with thin bench depth feels vacancy cost more acutely than a large firm, because there is often no one to absorb the empty seat’s work.

Anchor: Rule of Three (vacancy-coverage + management-time). Links to Note 1, Note 2, Note 5.