If You're Hiring Reactively, You're Already Behind

We're nearly in June. If you're thinking about a senior commercial hire and haven't started yet, it's worth doing some quick maths.

The average time to hire for a senior leadership role in the UK is over six weeks, based on a late 2025 survey of nearly 500 recruitment managers. Three months notice is increasingly standard at senior level. And once someone starts, the average SaaS sales hire takes 5.7 months to reach baseline productivity, according to SaleSo's 2025 benchmark report.

Put it together. Six weeks to find them, three months to get them through the door, nearly six months before they're generating meaningful revenue.

That's the optimistic version, where everything goes to plan!

The problem with pressure in hiring

The timeline is the visible cost. The less visible one is what happens to a hiring process when urgency is driving it.

When there's pressure on, the temptation is to move fast in ways that aren't actually fast. You pay over the odds because you need someone now. You don't run a thorough process. References get skipped. You don't see the full market. And then there's the fear - do we lose this person if we don't commit quickly? That fear leads to decisions that feel decisive in the moment but often aren't right.

The CIPD's 2024 Resourcing and Talent Planning Report found that 41% of organisations had candidates resign within the first 12 weeks, a figure that points to something going wrong upstream, whether in the brief, the assessment, or what was promised versus what was real. Rushed processes make all of those more likely.

Fast doesn't have to mean sloppy

The assumption that moving quickly requires cutting corners isn't quite right. A process can be rigorous and move fast - the two aren't in opposition. What they both require is the same thing: proper design upfront and genuine commitment to keeping momentum at every stage.

One of the businesses we work with runs a six-stage hiring process. Very senior, very busy leadership team. Each stage is two days apart at most. Candidates finish a conversation and hear back within minutes. Feedback is written up immediately after each interview, not filed away for later. It's demanding, and it works, because everyone involved treats dead time as the enemy.

On the flip, a 10-day gap between stages because something else landed mid-process, don’t get us wrong, it happens, and it's understandable. But candidates don't experience it as understandable. They experience it as silence, and the best ones start looking elsewhere.

Working backwards from when you actually need someone

The practical fix is to start with the date you need someone productive and build backwards from there. Add the ramp period. Add notice. Add process time. That's when the search needs to start, and for most senior hires, it's earlier than it feels necessary when there's no pressure yet.

That earlier start changes what's available to you. You can see more of the market. You can run a proper process without corners being cut. You can make a decision from a position of genuine confidence rather than narrowing options.

It's also worth understanding early on where candidates are in their own search. Someone expecting an offer from a final interview elsewhere can't realistically wait six weeks for a process to run. That's a conversation worth having at the start, not at stage three.

One thing compounds the other

Reactive hiring and a poor process tend to arrive together. The urgency creates the conditions for the shortcuts, and the shortcuts raise the probability of a mis-hire, which puts you back in the same position, often worse.

At 30 or 50 people, a delayed hire or a wrong one at senior level hits differently than it does at 200. The team is smaller, the gap is proportionally bigger, and there's less around it to absorb the cost.

If you need someone to contribute in Q1 next year, you're already late. The question now is how much further behind you're willing to get.