IT recruitment agency ITExpert studied 274 closed Middle+ level vacancies in 79 companies for 2025–2026 and calculated how long hiring actually takes in Ukrainian IT — and separately in MilTech.
IT recruitment agency ITExpert studied 274 closed Middle+ level vacancies in 79 companies for 2025–2026 and calculated how long hiring actually takes in Ukrainian IT — and separately in MilTech.
The sample included 274 closed vacancies in 79 companies for 2025–2026, at the Middle+ level. The largest share was made up of Development positions (47.8%), followed by DevOps (11.3%), Management/Leadership and Analytics (8.4% each), QA (7.3%), and the remaining 16,8% were other roles (Design, Marketing, Support, etc.). MilTech vacancies (48 positions) were analyzed separately from the main sample. All terms are in calendar days; vacancies with long pauses or significant changes in requirements during the search were not included in the study, and if there were several successful hires for one position, only the first one was counted.
The median time to fill a vacancy (Time-to-fill) is 26 calendar days, and the average time from first contact with a candidate to their acceptance of the offer (Time-to-hire) is 19 days. QA vacancies close the fastest — a median of 18 days, and the longest — Management/Leadership level positions, where the median reaches 40 days.
Most vacancies are closed in 11–30 days, but quick closures are more of an exception: only up to 5% of vacancies are closed within 10 days. Instead, almost every fourth vacancy crosses the 40-day threshold; after 43 days, the vacancy is already beyond the time frame in which 75% of all cases are closed, and after 62 days, it falls into the 10% of longest closings.
Vacancies in the MilTech segment (48 positions from the sample) take longer to close than in the IT market as a whole: the median Time-to-fill is 34 days, which is 31% longer, and the Time-to-hire is 27 days, which is 42% longer. ITExpert attributes this to a narrower pool of candidates, higher experience requirements, and a greater number of verification stages.
According to ITExpert CTO Mykola Klestov, the MilTech market now resembles a «red ocean with a small pool of candidates» — companies are often looking for not just an embedded or hardware engineer, but a specialist who can independently close an entire piece of the product: from the board and microcontrollers to the design and autonomy of the device.
Anna Reznikova, Head of Recruitment at ITExpert, notes that recruiting that lasts more than a few months is already a risk for business, as companies need people now to keep the product running and the team from burning out. According to her, there have been cases when hiring has stretched for more than 350 days, but she does not consider this practice a healthy hiring strategy.
Interestingly, in 7 out of 10 cases, the vacancy is ultimately filled by a candidate found in the first 10 days of the search — that is, the main time spent on hiring is often not spent on finding the right person, but on the subsequent stages of the process.
