Time to hire
Time to hire is the number of calendar days from the moment a team decides it needs a skill to the moment a productive engineer is actually doing the work. It is the hidden cost of in-house hiring, because every month a role stays open is a month of opportunity cost on whatever that engineer would have been building.
Time to hire is the metric most engineering leaders quietly underestimate. The sourcing, screening, interviews, offer cycle and notice period add up fast — three to six months for a senior engineer in Western Europe is normal, not exceptional. During that window the roadmap slips, the team carries the gap, and the product loses momentum that is hard to win back.
The honest take is that a nearshore or dedicated development team partner trades a chunk of time-to-hire for a recurring rate. A vetted engineer in days or weeks instead of months costs more per hour than someone you hire directly, and less per hour than the salary plus overhead plus the months of nothing shipped. Staff augmentation does the same trick for a single role.
The rule of thumb: when the calendar matters more than the unit cost — which is most of the time in modern product timelines — buying speed is rational. The right comparison is not contractor rate versus salary, it is total cost of ownership including the months you would otherwise spend waiting.
