When a role stays open for ninety days, the instinct is to blame the market. In our experience the market is rarely the constraint. Map the calendar days honestly and you will usually find that more than half were spent waiting on internal decisions, not searching for candidates.
Where the days actually go
- 8–12 days: finalising the job description and approval chain.
- 10–15 days: sourcing and initial screening.
- 20–30 days: waiting for interview panel availability.
- 10–14 days: internal debrief, alignment and offer approval.
- 15–30 days: notice period and joining.
Only one of those five blocks is genuinely about finding people. The rest is coordination — which means it is fixable without spending more on sourcing.
1. Lock the scorecard before you open the role
Agree on the five things this person must be able to do, and how each will be assessed, before the first CV arrives. Roles that begin without this almost always drift, and drift is the most expensive thing that can happen to a requisition.
2. Pre-block interview slots
Reserve recurring panel slots for the duration of the search rather than scheduling reactively. This single change routinely removes two to three weeks. Unused slots cost nothing; a candidate lost to a faster competitor costs the entire search.
“The best candidates are off the market in ten days. If your process needs thirty, you are not competing for them — you are competing for whoever is left.”
3. Debrief within 24 hours
Written feedback against the scorecard, submitted before panellists speak to each other, prevents both anchoring bias and the week-long silence that follows a busy interview day. Make it a hard rule.
4. Pre-approve the offer band
Approve the compensation range at the point the role is opened, not at the point an offer is needed. Finance approval after final interview is where good processes go to die.
None of these four changes lowers the hiring bar. They simply stop good candidates from falling out of a process that was too slow to keep them.