The interviews pile up. The role stays open.

Every round brings people who are almost right, and none of them make it through. The feedback differs from one interviewer to the next: one wants experience in the same industry, another wants a fit with the team, a third wants immediate availability.

The criteria were never agreed in writing, so each person applies their own and candidates become impossible to compare. Meanwhile the terms of the role — hours, commute, salary level — are still the ones set when it opened. Candidates drop out for reasons that repeat, but nobody collects those reasons in one place.

Four or five shared criteria, written as observable situations, with a clear line between what is required from day one and what can be learned in the first months.

In the same conversation, name the decision-maker: who signs the offer and who only gets an opinion. A process with three people who can say no and nobody obliged to say yes stalls on its own, whoever applies.

We redo the brief with the hiring manager and turn the criteria into an interview guide that everyone involved uses the same way. Every candidate gets the same questions and is scored on the same points, and the reasons for rejection are recorded.

Then we recalibrate the search area: the towns, the distances and the kinds of companies where the profile actually exists. If the market does not respond to an advert, we switch to direct approach — we identify the people already doing the role and contact them by name.

When the refusals cluster around one particular condition, we go back to that condition before continuing the search. See how we work on recruitment

The stages, not the number of CVs: how many of those approached agree to a conversation, how many pass the first assessment, exactly where candidates are lost and how long each transition takes. We also track scoring consistency — whether two assessors land on similar scores for the same person. Once the leaking stage is visible, the discussion about what to change gets much shorter.

Does this sound familiar?

Tell us how long the role has been open and where candidates stop.

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