How to reduce time to hire: where to start

Most TA leaders look at time to hire and see a sourcing problem or an interviewing problem. Both are often symptoms.

The actual driver is usually one of three things.

A vague job specification is the most common. When the hiring manager writes "5-7 years of experience, strong communication skills, and ability to work cross-functionally," the sourcer has to guess what actually matters. They go broad. The pipeline fills with volume, not fit. Every intake conversation that could have happened in week one instead happens in week four, when three rounds of interviews have already filtered the wrong candidates.

The wrong sourcing channel is the second. A company that needs a senior infrastructure engineer in a mid-size city might post to LinkedIn and wait. The person they want stopped applying to job posts two jobs ago. They are reachable by a direct message that names their specific stack and the actual scope of the role. But that message requires knowing who you are looking for and where they spend time. That work does not start until someone asks the right questions.

Assessment steps that do not filter signal are the third. Take-home assignments that are four hours long, technical screens that are not aligned to the actual job requirements, panel interviews with four stakeholders who were not briefed on the candidate before the call. None of these steps make a bad hire less likely. They make good candidates more likely to drop out.

The fix in each case starts before sourcing begins.

At AWS, Adam Kovacs ran hundreds of intake meetings before sourcing started on a role. The ones that worked were structured around four questions:

1. What does "qualified" actually mean on this team, for this role, at this moment?
2. Which requirements are true requirements, and which are preferences?
3. What does the first 90 days look like, and what would make this hire successful by month six?
4. Who makes the final call, and who is advising?

Companies that run a structured intake meeting before sourcing starts fill specialized roles in three to four weeks. Companies that skip it and let the recruiter interpret the job description take eight to twelve.

The intake meeting is not a kickoff call. It is a calibration session. The output is a one-page sourcing brief, not a job description. The sourcer searches against the brief, not the posting.

Most companies skip this step because it feels like overhead. It is the opposite. An hour at the start of a search saves three weeks in the middle of one.

Once you have a clean brief, you can diagnose where the real delay lives.

If the pipeline is slow to fill, the sourcing channel is probably wrong. The questions to ask: where do people with this background actually spend time? Is this a role where passive candidates dominate, or are there active applicants in the right places? What is the honest pitch that makes this role interesting to someone who has options?

If the pipeline fills but candidates drop out or fail interviews at high rates, the process is the problem. The questions to ask: are the interview steps testing for what the role actually requires? Are interviewers aligned on what they are looking for before they meet the candidate? Is the time between first contact and offer longer than four weeks?

Both problems are fixable. The mistake is treating them the same way. More sourcing volume does not help a broken process. A tighter process does not help a pipeline that has no qualified candidates in it.

Diagnose first. The intervention follows from the diagnosis.