By Kelly Johnson, Senior Business Manager
A recruitment process that would normally take six weeks can easily stretch to ten once the school holidays begin. Not because the market has changed, but because the people involved in making decisions are harder to get in a room, on a call, or even in the office at the same time.
None of this is unusual. It happens every summer, to every business. The difference between a process that stalls and one that keeps moving is not luck. It is planning.
The pattern is familiar. A hiring manager goes on leave for two weeks and feedback on a shortlist sits untouched until they are back. An interview panel needs three people in the room and one is always missing. A candidate who was ready to move two weeks ago has since had an offer elsewhere, because nobody got back to them in time.
Each delay looks small on its own. Stacked together across a six week hiring process, they add a month or more to a timeline that should not need it.
The single biggest fix is deciding, in advance, who can make a call when the primary decision maker is out of the office. This does not need to be a formal handover. It can be as simple as agreeing that a deputy can approve a shortlist or confirm an offer if the hiring manager is unreachable for more than a few days. Without that agreement, everything defaults to waiting.
Insisting on a full panel, in person, on a fixed date is the fastest way to lose momentum in August. Video interviews solve most of the availability problem. A panel member joining from a laptop while on leave is not ideal, but it is far better than a candidate being told to wait three weeks for everyone's diaries to align.
Silence is what costs businesses their best candidates during the holiday period, not delay itself. A candidate who hears nothing for two weeks assumes the worst and starts looking elsewhere. A short message explaining that the hiring manager is back on a specific date, and that the next step will follow shortly after, costs nothing and keeps a candidate engaged.
This is where using a recruitment partner earns its value most clearly. We manage communication with candidates throughout, chase feedback before it becomes a bottleneck, and flag early when a process is at risk of drifting so you can decide how to handle it rather than discovering the delay after the fact.
A six week process does not have to become a ten week one. It becomes one because nobody was managing the gaps.
If you have a role you need to keep moving through the summer, talk to us about how we can help.
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