A role has been open for six weeks. The instinct is to widen the funnel: more sourcing, more outreach, a second firm. The instinct is usually wrong. A req that has crossed forty-five days is rarely starved for candidates. It is stuck on a decision no one has made.
We know roughly how long a clean search takes. From kickoff to an accepted offer, the median in our dataset is 43 days. A role still open past that mark has crossed the point where good searches close, and the cause is almost never the part founders reach for first.
Before you spend another dollar on sourcing, it is worth asking what the open req is actually telling you.
It is usually a decision problem
Stale reqs cluster around a small number of failures, and none of them are about candidate supply. The scorecard was never calibrated, so two interviewers are screening for two different people. The hiring manager has not agreed with the team on what good looks like, so every strong candidate gets a different objection. The process loses people between rounds (a week of silence here, an unscheduled final there) and the best candidates, who have other offers, are gone before the debrief.
These are decision failures wearing the costume of a sourcing failure. More candidates do not fix an uncalibrated bar; they just give you more people to disagree about. The pipeline was never the constraint. The constraint was upstream, in the room where the team has not yet agreed what it is hiring for.
More candidates do not fix an uncalibrated bar. They just give you more people to disagree about.
What a stale req signals to candidates
An open req broadcasts the whole time it waits. Strong candidates talk to each other, and a role that has been live for two months reads as a warning. Either the company cannot decide, or the bar is impossibly high, or something about the seat is wrong that no one will name. None of those readings make a person want to take your final-round call.
The candidates already in your process read it too. Every extra week of silence tells them they are not a priority, and the ones with options act on that. The slow process does not just fail to close. It drives away the people you most wanted, because the people with the most choices are the least willing to wait.
What it costs the team carrying the gap
There is also a cost inside the building. The work the open seat was meant to do does not pause. It lands on the people already there, who absorb the overflow quietly until they stop absorbing it quietly. A gap held open for months is a slow tax on the team carrying it, and that tax compounds into the kind of fatigue that opens a second req you did not plan for.
Meanwhile the runway spends at the same rate whether the seat is filled or empty. You are paying the full cost of the plan and getting a fraction of the capability. An open req is a capability you have funded and are not receiving. Every week it stays open, you pay full price for work that never happens.
What to audit before adding sourcing
When a search crosses forty-five days, stop the outreach and audit the decision instead. The fix is almost always upstream.
- Is the scorecard calibrated, and does every interviewer screen against the same definition of good?
- Has the hiring manager and the team that will work alongside the hire actually agreed on the bar, out loud?
- Where in the process are candidates going cold: which handoff, which gap between rounds, which unanswered week?
- Is the seat scoped to a real person who exists in the market, or to a composite no one can be?
Run that audit before you widen the funnel. Most reopened searches close because the team finally agreed on what it was looking for, not because more candidates appeared. The forty-five-day mark is a signal to decide.