Why Are Hiring Timelines Getting Longer?

Krissy Manzano: Hello and welcome to the Blueprint Roundtable Podcast. I’m your host today, Krissy Manzano. And today’s topic, it’s a very fitting one. Why are hiring timelines getting longer? So, Lizzy, you wanna kick us off?

Lizzy Castro: Yeah. I think it’s a great topic. I think number one thing that comes to mind is not having alignment on the candidate profile. From my personal experience, I’ve been through multiple interview processes and working with hiring managers where we establish a profile, let’s say two months ago, we start having candidates move through the process, and throughout that entire process, it’s either seeing that, oh, we wanna add this to the profile, or we want to take away this quality in the profile, or now we need this requirement.

Lizzy Castro: And as a recruiter and a sourcer, that then just means we have to go back to square one and on top of it too, that means for the most part, you sometimes do have to disqualify candidates that are already in the process because now they no longer fit that updated profile. Definitely think that makes interview processes and just the whole hiring process double in time.

Krissy Manzano: Yeah. Question for you real quick, Matt, before you share your thoughts. Why do you think now people, because you know, in 2021, the profile and even 2022 was not changed, like, you know, it was like speed to hire, right? And you could argue that was not the best way to go about it to some extent. But why do you think people continue to change the profile so much right now?

Lizzy Castro: That’s honestly something I think I ask myself whenever I hear a profile is changing again. I honestly think it comes to, it comes down to maybe that specific hiring manager, maybe the head person who makes the overall decision at the end, not truly realizing what this role is and what qualities they need to succeed.

Lizzy Castro: I think also some of the reasons why they do change is maybe someone that’s already in seat that has a specific profile just is not performing well in the role and then that makes us take steps back and requalify that profile all over again. But those are probably the two things that come to mind most.

Krissy Manzano: Yeah, that makes sense.

Lizzy Castro: Yeah. Matt, what are your thoughts?

Matt Lewers: Yeah, I have a couple thoughts. One actually came up yesterday I was talking to a former colleague and friend of mine who was a strategic AM for Salesforce and was recently let go, and she is in multiple interview processes currently. And she said the average steps, and now these are for enterprise roles, but she said the average number of steps that she’s being quoted in the interview process is nine different steps.

Matt Lewers: Which is well above and beyond anything that the majority of our clients or that I’m used to, to going through the sense I get from that, her perspective and my own observations would be because there’s been so many layoffs, and that’s all you hear about, I think there’s quite a few individuals out there that feel okay, all of a sudden now there’s this flood of talent on the market, so we can afford to be pickier. And we can also, you know, take our time to vet out candidates more than we normally would. So they’re introducing new interview steps in some cases, or a lot of this kind of also ties into what Lizzy was talking about where, because there’s a perception that there’s an overabundance of high quality individuals searching for their next opportunity, they can afford to recalibrate, and when they recalibrate frequently, what we’re seeing is requirements are going up, right?

Matt Lewers: It might have been five years enterprise experience and now it’s seven, or they needed to have managed 1 million quotas for the last three years, and now it’s, well, not only that, but they need to have also been responsible for the account management on top of the acquisition play. So I think a lot of it timing wise is just sort of what we’re seeing in the macroeconomics of the economy with the recent number of layoffs that the tech sector specifically has been impacted with.

Matt Lewers: I think that’s a big reason we’re seeing the timelines draw out both in, in our client base, but then also just broaden the greater sense of things. I you know, in terms of correcting that, it’s, there’s really only so much we can do as a partner for our hiring teams, right? I think a lot of our clients do a great job of narrowing in their ICP early, so when there are changes, it’s typically within the first couple of weeks that we’re working with them, thankfully. I think there’s also something to be said that, if as a hiring manager you interview six to eight candidates, whether they’re coming from an agency like us or they’re inbound there’s, that is a good barometer of the true addressable market, if you will, or the candidate pool. Right. If you’re relying on, if you’re expecting to hire somebody in one or two, having one or two interviews with like one or two candidates I think it’s probably not the best case.

Matt Lewers: I think it’s typically taking six to eight candidates before the hiring manager says, okay, I’ve seen enough of what’s out there on the market. This is these candidates, or this exact profile is really resonating well with our hiring team. And so that sometimes can also churn out some of these conditions where we’re seeing the adjustments being made midstream where they’re either adding, they’re adding a new individual like head of customer success or head of product or head of sales engineering into the process where they weren’t previously, again, lengthening timelines or that is the catalyst for those calibrations that Lizzy was talking about.

Matt Lewers: So, I know I just brain dumped a lot of information, but I think a huge reason we’re seeing these timelines stretch out is the perception that there’s a plethora of talent to go

Krissy Manzano: It’s always so interesting to me, especially, you know, now sitting on the recruiting side and not at the on the side of being the hiring manager. Like, you know, some of us were for our whole careers. Why people continue to treat hiring as like something we figure out as we go along. Like they think, okay, I know I wanna hire two AEs and I know that these four people will be a part of the process.

Krissy Manzano: And I feel like I have a good idea of what I want. So I don’t need, I don’t have time or wanna spend time to like really go through like the skills and behaviors. Like I copy and pasted a job description or used a former one, and then I went and made some tweaks, which made me feel like I customized it, even though you probably just added things in that from that previous job description that has no place for yours.

Krissy Manzano: It’s interesting to me how for go-to-market strategy, it’s like where companies fail or actually like, are successful. How they’re hiring is not as important as that plan for the go-to-market strategy, right? It’s like the profiles, like they want to see how they feel versus, you know, actually understanding what they really need.

Krissy Manzano: You all can tell me your thoughts about this. Like there’s now, right now in this moment, it’s a very reactive industry, but right now, in this moment, there is a lot more scrutiny in hiring, right? If you hire somebody, and you’re gonna spend money given what people, you know, the economy and all those things, they need to be successful.

Krissy Manzano: And so, I feel like fear is driving the hiring process. Like how, like I, I have to make sure this person is successful and can hit the ground running. And so that’s why I want them to have this type of experience, have this many years of experience here and, you know, because they feel like that’s the only thing that’s gonna make them feel like someone will be successful even though, factually and data-wise, it could actually be the worst thing that they do. Or really take away from awesome talent that they could be getting and be getting much faster. That I don’t know what your’s thoughts are on that.

Krissy Manzano: Don’t all speak at once. Okay. Just calm down. Raise your hand.

Matt Lewers: Oh, I can go. Yeah, I think that’s, I think that’s spot on. There’s a lot of different things, right, that we’ve all touched on that are interrelated. And it’s hard to figure out what’s the cause and what’s the effect for some of these because there’s so many things happening in real time across individual clients, individual roles, and then the economy as a whole. I think if I was gonna try to give one tip to how to mitigate this early and often, I think whether you’re an internal or external recruiter or sourcer, I think one of the best things you can do is ahead of fully kicking off any search is finding five to six profiles. Just individuals on LinkedIn. You don’t even have to have reached out to ’em before. But based on the parameters of what you’re looking for, take those profiles to your hiring manager and maybe one step above, like whether it’s the VP of sales or the CRO. If you can get those two individuals feedback for 20, maybe 30 minutes max upfront, but, and have them calibrate on those profiles in real time with you to tell you, this looks great for these reasons, this does not look great.

Matt Lewers: Or here’s a red flag or yellow. You can save hours for all parties hours if you do that upfront and it’s, yes, you have to get a little bit of elbow grease in on the front end, but I mean, you’re ultimately saving the hiring manager, the recruiter, the sourcer, the CRO, CFO, whoever. I mean, you’re saving hours in the process.

Matt Lewers: So if I was gonna give one tip on how to continue to try to mitigate some of these sales cycle or these interview cycle links, that would be the first step in the process.

Lizzy Castro: Just because with the hiring process, of course, C-level executives are gonna be also the ones who are signing off and approving these potential offers going to these candidates. And the last thing, any hiring manager, any recruiter, any candidate wants is an offer, make it to the final stage, get to the offer stage, and then that offer is potentially rejected because there’s no alignment on that profile from those C-level executives as well.

Lizzy Castro: So I completely agree with that statement.

Krissy Manzano: No, absolutely. I mean, I think when it comes, you know, it’s okay if you are more thoughtful about hiring there. That’s a good thing. But, you know, keep it simple, right? It doesn’t and I saw someone post this the other day. It’s like one person or you’re hiring, should not make a break a company. Whether it’s a new hire or not.

Krissy Manzano: And so I say sometimes again. Looking at your qualifica, like starting before the job description, kind of, to your point, Matt, right? Like looking at profiles, but really being honest with, especially if you’re an early stage company, right? Where you don’t have a lot of data and facts to know what will work.

Krissy Manzano: You need to be honest when you write out skills and behaviors first before experience, you know, what skills do they need to have? Like great closing skills, like active listening. Those are just a couple of examples, right? That are very key. That’s not just like to make someone feel good, but go, you know, from an experience standpoint too, is this what I’m requiring?

Krissy Manzano: Is this factually based? Do I have facts and data that support it? And the answer might be no, and that’s okay. But you need to make sure that you go, this makes me feel good. And this is part of my guess, so that when you’re in the interview process and maybe someone doesn’t have that, but they’re hitting all the other points, it’s like, okay, I don’t have facts and data to back this up.

Krissy Manzano: And so I don’t need to overreach too hard on this, right? It’s just like when people talk about industry experience. There’s so many times where they don’t actually have fact and data to support that, but the onboarding process felt easier because you know, people get so caught up in like, I want them to be able to say the acronyms and it’s like, you can teach them that.

Krissy Manzano: Or if they’re senior sellers like, they can learn that. Like it’s not that hard, right? Like they can, a great seller doesn’t actually have to understand the product that in industry that intimately to do a good job. But that’s all the time we have for today. We went a little bit over, but I know it’s a really relevant topic and hopefully you can take away a few tips that we gave to shorten that interview process to get people up to speed and to really hit the ground running.

Krissy Manzano: So until next time, we’ll see you later. Bye.