Which of the three hiring failures is yours
Tech talent hiring fails in three distinct ways. "We cannot find people" usually means one of them. They need different fixes, and applying the wrong one is how a team spends six months getting nowhere.
Read the three signals below. One of them will describe your last quarter uncomfortably well.
You cannot find them
Few applicants arrive, and the ones who do are not close. The shortlist is thin or empty.
The signal
Fewer than ten relevant applicants in a month of an open role.
The usual cause
One of two things, and often both.
The job description is a wish list rather than a job. Eight years of a framework that is six years old. Four specialisms that rarely live in one person. Every requirement added by someone protecting themselves from a bad hire, and the combined effect is a role nobody applies for. Good developers read it and move on.
Or you are searching one city when the work does not need one. That is a reach problem, and hiring globally solves it directly.
What to do first
Split the requirements into must-have and nice-to-have, out loud, with the hiring manager in the room. Most lists lose half their must-haves in twenty minutes. Then decide whether the role genuinely needs to sit in one place.
You cannot hire them
Good candidates arrive and then leave. This is the most common failure, and the least diagnosed.
The signal
Candidates withdraw part-way through, go quiet after a stage, or decline the offer. You have a pipeline. It leaks.
The usual cause
Elapsed time, almost always. Strong developers are in process with two or three companies and accept the first reasonable offer. Whoever moves fastest wins, and it is often not the company with the best role.
What to do first
Measure your actual time to hire, from first contact to offer. Not your intended number, the real one from your last three hires. Most teams are surprised, and the surprise is the useful part. The next section is about this.
You cannot keep them
People join, and inside a year they leave. It presents as a hiring problem because the role keeps coming back.
The signal
The same position opens every twelve months. Exit conversations are polite and vague.
The usual cause
The job is not the job that was advertised. Someone joined to build and spends their week on incidents. Or ownership was promised and the decisions happen elsewhere.
What to do first
Stop recruiting for a month and ask the last two leavers what the job actually turned out to be. Hiring into an unfixed retention problem is the most expensive thing on this page, and teams that scale engineering capacity without losing control of it treat this as a structural question rather than a people one.
If two of these describe you
Fix the process one first.
A reach problem is slow to solve and a retention problem is slow to solve. A process problem can be improved in a fortnight, and it makes the other two cheaper to work on, because every candidate you stop losing is one you do not have to find again.
Not sure which of the three you have? A short conversation and your last three hiring timelines usually settle it, and there is nothing to buy at that stage.
