Recruiters get the blame for slow time-to-hire, but are your hiring managers unknowingly sabotaging your results?
By their own admission, hiring managers make plenty of mistakes.
As per a 2024 Resume Genius report, 70% of hiring managers admitted blatantly lying to candidates during the recruiting process. Nearly a third of bad hires happen because hiring managers look only at technical skills and miss red flags around attitude and cultural fit. And decision paralysis is everywhere. Hiring managers are conducting 42% more interviews per hire than in 2021 (some companies are taking 8-12 rounds!) and feedback can take weeks – Indeed reports an average interview-to-response time of 24 business days.
No wonder time-to-fill now lingers around 49 days.
These are old, old problems. As far back as 2017, surveys were showing the biggest hiring bottlenecks are caused by hiring managers who “just need a few more days.” Managers are hesitating, over-interviewing, and stalling offers in the name of finding the perfect fit. Meanwhile, top candidates are vanishing to competitors who move faster.
Could it be that efficiency dies not on the recruiter’s desk, but in hiring managers accidentally derailing the process?
Here’s How Hiring Managers Are Becoming Obstacles
Let’s be clear, not all hiring managers are slowing down the pace of hiring. For those that are, here are some reasons why they’re hurting the efficiency of your process.
Time pressures that leave recruiters and candidates hanging
“I don’t have time” is a common – and legitimate – response from hiring managers who’ve had hiring layered on top of their “real” work. It’s probably true that they don’t have much time for intake meetings, or to review resumes, or for interview debrief calls. But if you’re not running recruitment like a project, with clear goals, milestones and deadlines upfront, you’re only helping those time pressures create bottlenecks.
The purple squirrel hunt
Hiring managers want, or think they need, the perfect candidate with 100% of the qualifications, expertise, ambition and passion they’re looking for. This is a type of scarcity bias where we covet the things that are in shortest supply. Yet sometimes your best performers are those new to the industry or right out of school, or they have unconventional backgrounds. Companies need to clearly define roles at the outset and identify the must-haves versus the nice-to-haves. Otherwise, you risk missing out on high-potential talent that can be coached to greatness.
Overly selective and risk averse
One reason why hiring managers are still hunting for unicorns is they’re not being supported to spot potential or take calculated risk on unconventional candidates. This is why, as Harvard analysis shows, even companies who widen the talent pool with skills-based hiring policies end up defaulting to degree requirements. Managers reinstate them in interviews and hiring decisions as a proxy for competence when they don’t feel confident judging a candidate’s potential.
Lack of clarity around interviewing
Perhaps the greatest way that hiring managers can derail the hiring process is interviewing on the fly. No structured format? It’s harder to evaluate candidates objectively and slows decision-making down. Too many interviews? This shows disregard for the good candidates who were otherwise pumped, primed and ready to go. Each additional interview adds measurable cost and risk: 58% of candidates report withdrawing from a process due to excessive interview rounds or slow feedback.
No skin in the game
Recruiters, not hiring managers, tend to own the hiring metrics. Time-to-fill, quality of hire, candidate satisfaction, and so on live on recruiting dashboards, so there’s little incentive for hiring managers to prioritize recruitment activities over other work. Interview feedback that takes weeks, not days doesn’t hurt the hiring manager’s numbers. It only hurts recruiting’s numbers.
Strategies to Achieve a Smoother Hiring Workflow
Any bottleneck can cost organizations time and resources and hurt their ability to hire top talent. The phrase work smarter, not harder, is relevant here. The most effective solutions combine structure, communication, and shared ownership of outcomes.
1. Loop hiring managers in early
Unqualified applicants bog everyone down, especially if you’re handling a significant requisition load, and the hiring manager and recruiter must be on the same page regarding the job’s qualifications and expectations from the outset. The intake meeting determines everything that follows, so ditch the quick email exchange and structure it as a strategic planning session where recruiters and hiring managers align on role requirements, ideal candidate profile, assessment criteria, and process timeline. What does success look like after six months? Which skills are non-negotiable versus nice-to-have? What’s driving this hiring need? Both roles should agree on the best recruitment strategy for the position.
2. Co-create SLAs and candidate scorecards
Service level agreements set the tone upfront. They clarify who does what, when and how, with specific response windows for each stage (e.g. interview feedback within 24 hours, offer decisions within a week). Combined with standardized scorecards, integrated into your ATS and used consistently, you cut opportunities for indecision and build speed and consistency in decision-making.
Co-create these documents – when both parties define realistic timelines and evaluation rubrics together, they’re more likely to honor them. Automate status updates and reminders through your ATS to create gentle accountability.
3. Pre-close the manager with data
A few horror stories tend to sharpen a hiring manager’s focus, so show them how a slow hiring process is a talent repellent and a financial drain on the business. Anywhere between 25% and 46% of candidates drop out of a hiring process because scheduling the first interview takes too long, depending on which surveys you read. In competitive sectors, the best candidates are off the market within 10 days. When your process takes 6, 7, 8 weeks, you’re no longer competing for A-players, just settling for whoever’s still available.
There’s also a productivity cost. Suppose every day a critical role stays vacant costs your business $500 in lost productivity. Multiply that across 10 open roles and an average 49 day time to fill, and you’re hemorrhaging $245,000 per hiring cycle – and that’s before you factor in the hiring manager’s time. If a hiring manager conducts 17 interviews per hire (the US average) and each one takes an hour, that’s 17 hours per role. Hire 100 people annually and you’ve burned 1,700 hours just interviewing — equivalent to one person working 10 months straight.
Your business has its own conversion data. Response times. Interview completion rates. Offer acceptance rates. Time to fill. Make this data visible and show hiring managers exactly how every delay or dropped ball impacts the team, the candidate pool, and the bottom line.
4. Schedule regular momentum checks
Regular touchpoints between recruiters and hiring managers is a no-brainer for avoiding miscommunication, yet it’s astonishing how many teams skip these calibration sessions. Hiring is always a moving target – maybe candidate availability is tighter than expected, or salary expectations exceed your budget. Hiring managers and recruiters need to share this information so they can adjust expectations or accelerate decisions.
Schedule a debrief meeting post-hire (or hiring miss). Whether you get it right or wrong, you really need to know why. The recruiter and hiring manager relationship should be a feedback loop, so you can continuously improve.
Start Now, Not Next Quarter
Your competitive advantage depends on your hiring efficiency and speed. Your hiring managers hold the keys to that speed and frankly, there’s no excuse for ignoring the bottlenecks they’re accidentally creating because they rank among the easiest to fix. The data already paints a picture of teams winning by acting quickly enough to keep top talent in play. The smartest teams act on that data and commit to doing better, starting now.
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