Why Tech Hiring Really Takes So Long — And What We Learned From It

We’ve seen this happen far too often. A company opens up a senior Java engineering role. Everyone believes it will be a quick, straightforward hire. Great brand, good comp, plenty of talent in the market. Six weeks, maybe eight at most.

Then the weeks turn into months. One of our clients went through that exact experience before we started working with them. They sourced 327 profiles, ran 71 screening calls, conducted 19 technical interviews, and still came out with nothing.

When we eventually asked the hiring leader what had happened, she said something that has shaped everything we do at Tribera:

“We didn’t run out of talent. We just never got clear on what ‘good’ actually meant.”

Most organisations don’t struggle because there isn’t enough talent — they struggle because their process is full of noise. And when there’s noise, the default response is always the same: “let’s source more.”

LinkedIn’s global hiring report shows that 62% of delays in tech hiring are caused by internal misalignment, not lack of candidates. Karat’s 2023 benchmark found that only 12% of sourced candidates even make it to a technical interview, and Glassdoor reports that 75% of CVs are rejected by keyword filters before a human sees them.

At Tribera, we didn’t build another sourcing engine. We built a signal engine. Today, we walk into every role with 50+ pre-qualified talent signals before a single CV is sent to a hiring manager.

When that same client came back with a similar Java requirement, we generated 14 profiles, shortlisted 6, interviewed 3, and closed the role in 22 days.

Same org. Same role. Same market — just more clarity.

We’ll always choose three people we believe in over fifty we “hope” might work. That’s not a process choice — that’s a value system.