Why your last three hires took six months

Most searches don't run long because the market is thin. They run long because of the time nobody bills for — the quiet weeks between a posted role and a real shortlist, the second round that never gets scheduled, the calibration conversation that should have happened in week one and finally happens in week eleven. The bottleneck in modern hiring is almost never sourcing. It's the ambiguity that sits on either side of it.

Six months is usually five problems stacked on top of each other

When we audit a search that has run long, the timeline almost always falls into the same five buckets. A brief that was never really agreed. A shortlist that was accepted out of politeness rather than conviction. An interview loop that stretched because nobody owned the scheduling. A candidate who went cold because feedback took ten days. A counter-offer that was never prepared for, because nobody believed it would happen until it did.

None of these look like search problems from the outside. Each one on its own is a day or two of slippage. Stacked together across a six-week search they become a six-month one.

The brief is the cheapest place to fix it

The highest-leverage conversation in any search is the first working session on the brief — not the sourcing plan, not the interview loop, not the offer. A proper brief takes a couple of hours and forces the hiring team to say out loud what they actually want, including the criteria nobody writes down. Level of seniority is easy. What "good" looks like versus what "great" looks like is harder. Whether the role can be remote. Whether a candidate from outside the industry would survive. Whether the hiring manager is willing to flex on comp for the top of the list.

Every one of those questions gets answered at some point in the search. The only question is whether you answer it in week one or week eleven. Answered in week one, it saves you months. Answered in week eleven, it is the reason you're six months in with nothing to show.

Silence is the most expensive cost in the process

The second-biggest cause of a long search is the interval between events in the candidate experience. A strong candidate who hears nothing for ten days after an interview is a strong candidate who has already booked two more interviews somewhere else. By the time your feedback arrives, you are no longer in a single-threaded conversation with them — you're in a bidding one.

The fix is unglamorous: someone owns the loop, end to end, and the loop moves in days not weeks. If your agency isn't running that for you, either they should be, or you should run it yourself. The one thing that cannot happen is for nobody to own it — which is, unfortunately, the default.

What a fast search actually looks like

For most searches, a calibrated shortlist inside ten working days is realistic. First round inside fifteen. Second round inside twenty. Offer inside thirty. If you're materially outside those numbers, the search is not stuck on the market — it is stuck on the process around the market. That's a fixable problem, and the fix usually sits in the brief or the loop, not in the sourcing. Start there before you throw more recruiters at it.