An aging requisition is an open role that has passed an agreed age threshold without being filled. Because time to fill only exists once a hire happens, it quietly excludes the searches failing right now. Aging measures the open inventory instead, which is where the unfilled problems actually live.
Survivorship. Time to fill is calculated from requisitions that closed, so a role that has been open for seven months and is still open contributes nothing to it. A team can report a healthy average while carrying a growing pile of searches nobody can close. The averages even improve when the hardest roles stay open, because only the easy ones graduate into the calculation. Aging inverts the view. Instead of asking how long finished searches took, it asks how old the unfinished ones are today, which is the number a business leader waiting on a hire actually cares about. Report both. One tells you about process speed, the other tells you what is currently stuck, and only the second prompts action this week.
Set it per job family from your own closed-search history, then treat crossing it as a trigger rather than a judgement. If a support role normally closes in a few weeks, an open one at double that age deserves attention. If a specialist engineering search normally runs for months, applying the same threshold generates noise and people learn to ignore the alert. Agree the thresholds with hiring managers in advance so nobody argues about the definition once a role is in trouble. Also decide what resets the clock. Reopening a rescoped role usually should reset it; putting a role on hold usually should pause it rather than reset. Write the rules into the [applicant tracking system](/ats) so the age field is trustworthy.
The causes cluster into four, and they need different fixes. Scope: the role as written does not exist in the market, usually a combination of skills that rarely appear in one person. Price: the band sits below what the required profile commands, and no amount of sourcing solves it. Process: candidates were available but the loop lost them to delay, scheduling or indecision. Commitment: the manager is not actually ready to hire, and the requisition is aspirational. Diagnosing which one applies takes a single honest conversation and a look at the pipeline history. Roles that aged with plenty of candidates who withdrew have a process problem. Roles that aged with almost no qualified candidates ever entering have a scope or price problem.
Run a standing review of everything past threshold and force one of four outcomes on each: rescope, reprice, reassign, or close. No role leaves the meeting unchanged, because leaving it unchanged is what produced the age in the first place. Rescoping usually means splitting an impossible role into two realistic ones or converting a must-have into a trainable skill. Repricing means going to the budget holder with market evidence. Reassigning helps when a search has gone stale for the recruiter rather than the market. Closing is not a failure; carrying dead requisitions distorts every capacity number the team reports. Rewriting the [job description](/job-descriptions) around what the market actually offers is often the single most effective rescoping move.
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