08/28/2026
A recent AAPPR benchmarking report has two takeaways worth the read, regardless of where your facility sits in the rankings.
First, time-to-fill is no longer the right primary metric for the hardest specialties. Cost per vacancy day has overtaken it because the cost moves with revenue, while time-to-fill plateaus once you cross 180 days.
Second, the gap between the top quartile and median time-to-fill has widened, not narrowed. That means the operational fixes that worked in 2022, including more recruiters, more job board spend, and more LinkedIn outreach, are returning less now than they did then.
From our seat, the systems that have closed the gap have done it by building parallel, specialty-specific pipelines, not by adding more general recruiting capacity.
Link:
https://aappr.org/2025/09/10/physician-recruitment-teams-face-consistent-demand-and-lengthy-search-times-according-to-aappr-report/
