Recruiting Hours a Week

Last updated: October 27, 2026

Recruiting Hours a Week (shown as "Recruiting (h/wk)") is the average number of hours per person per working week spent in interviews, detected from applicant tracking system (ATS) links in calendar invites.

Why it matters

Hiring takes engineering time. Tracking it helps you:

  • See the hiring load on individuals and teams.

  • Spot imbalances, such as a few people carrying most interviews.

  • Plan capacity for sprints and roadmaps during hiring pushes.

  • Protect core work and prevent burnout by reading recruiting hours next to other productivity metrics.

Individuals can see their own commitment and compare with peers. Managers can spread interviews fairly and set norms such as "2 to 3 hours per week per person". Hiring managers and recruiters can see which teams carry interview load and when they have room for more.

How it works

Recruiting hours a week = (Total recruiting hours ÷ Active weekdays) × 5

How Span detects interviews. An event is a recruiting meeting when it isn't part of a recurring series and its description contains a link to one of these ATS platforms:

  • Greenhouse (.greenhouse.io)

  • Ashby (.ashbyhq.com)

  • Lever (.lever.co)

Which recruiting meetings count. The event must be:

  • confirmed (not tentative or cancelled),

  • 4 hours or shorter, and

  • on an invite with one or two invitees who haven't declined. The candidate often isn't on the internal calendar copy, so a single interviewer counts.

A person's time counts when Span reads their own calendar, they didn't mark the event as free, and they didn't decline it.

Steps:

  1. Span sums each person's qualifying recruiting hours, merging overlapping interviews.

  2. It drops weekends and out-of-office days.

  3. It divides by active weekdays and multiplies by 5.

Setup

  • Connect Google Calendar or Microsoft (Outlook) calendar.

  • Make sure interview invites include a Greenhouse, Ashby, or Lever link in the description. ATS tools add these to the invites they send.

Find the metric in Insights → Productivity → Focus time, in the "Recruiting (h/wk)" column, on team and person pages, and in custom dashboards.

Things to know

  • Worked example: an engineer has three 1-hour Greenhouse interviews in a week, each with just the engineer on the invite, plus one panel interview invite with 4 interviewers. They were in office all 5 weekdays. Recruiting hours = 3 ÷ 5 × 5 = 3.0 h/wk. The panel doesn't count here because it has more than two non-declining invitees.

  • Panels and debriefs don't count as recruiting: invites with three or more non-declining invitees are left out of Recruiting. They still count in All meeting time if they meet the general rules, so they still lower focus time.

  • No ATS link, no recruiting: interviews scheduled by hand without a Greenhouse, Ashby, or Lever link count as Ad-hoc.

  • Other ATS tools: Span checks only the three domains above. Interviews from other tools count as Ad-hoc.

  • Recurring events don't count: a weekly hiring committee series with an ATS link isn't counted as recruiting.

  • Out-of-office days and weekends are left out.

  • Your ATS's interview report will be higher, because it counts every interview, panels included.

Related articles

Focus Time

Ad Hoc Hours a Week

Recurring Meetings Hours Per Week

OOO Person-Days

Need help?

Contact your Span account team or reach out to support@span.app.