Why your tech hiring process takes too long (and how to speed it up)
It’s Thursday afternoon. After two weeks of back and forth, the team finally agrees: the candidate from the second round is the one. You call her with the good news and she tells you, very politely, that she signed with another company on Monday.
Nobody did anything particularly wrong. The other process was simply faster. We see this a lot when we review hiring processes with companies: there were candidates, good ones, but they dropped away along the way. Experienced tech and digital people rarely have just one conversation going, and every dead week is a week in which someone else can get there first. These are the bottlenecks we come across most often, and what we usually suggest to clear them without lowering the bar.
Interviewing before the profile is clear
This is the most common one, and the slowest to show up. The role opens with a fairly generic description, the first candidates are interviewed and then, in the third conversation, someone on the team mentions that what they really need is someone with more product experience. Back to square one.
Before you publish anything, it’s worth spending an hour with everyone who will be involved and agreeing what is a must, what would be a bonus and what, if you’re honest, doesn’t matter much. And one thing that often gets forgotten: who makes the final call. When that isn’t clear, decisions sit waiting for two people who haven’t actually talked to each other to agree.
More interviews don’t buy more certainty
Every extra stage adds days of scheduling, and not always new information. More than once we’ve seen processes with five or six rounds where two of them assessed exactly the same thing, just with a different person across the table.
Look at what each interview actually adds and merge any that overlap. In most of the searches we run, an initial conversation, a technical test or interview and a final interview with the hiring manager are enough. If someone else on the team needs to meet the candidate, they can almost always join one of those.
The take-home test nobody wants to do
An exercise that eats a whole weekend says a lot about a company, and not always what it thinks. The candidates with the most options are exactly the ones with the least spare time, so an oversized test ends up screening for availability more than for ability.
A focused exercise that takes a couple of hours works better. So does asking candidates to walk you through a real project they’ve worked on. With good questions, that conversation tells you as much as a long test, and the candidate experiences it very differently.
The silence after the interview
If we had to point to one moment where candidates are lost, it would be this one. The interview goes well, the person leaves feeling good, and then ten days pass with no news. Meanwhile another company has called them twice.
What we recommend is simple. Block a fixed slot in the team’s diary from the start of the process to discuss each interview, ideally the next day. And always tell candidates what the next step is and when they’ll hear back, even if the answer turns out to be no. A quick, well-explained no leaves a better impression than a yes that arrives too late.
Leaving money until the end
Raising salary range, working arrangements and conditions in the first call can feel premature. It isn’t. It’s the easiest way to avoid a finalist discovering, four weeks in, that the offer is well below what they expected or that “hybrid” meant four days a week in the office.
The final offer should confirm what you’ve already discussed. When it brings surprises, you end up in a fresh negotiation at exactly the point where every day counts most.
Before you open your next role
Here’s an exercise that works well. Take the last process you closed and write down how many days passed between each stage and the next. You’ll almost always find two or three long gaps that have little to do with the candidates: diaries that don’t line up and decisions nobody quite gets round to making. That’s where your room to move faster is.
At Mimmic Talent every search begins with an active listening session where we pin down the profile and the timeline with your team, and we only introduce candidates we’ve already assessed. If you’d like us to look over how your next process is set up, get in touch.