Is Time and Caution Costing Employers Their Best Hires?
By Jo Healan, Recruitment Manager at MATCHUP
At MATCHUP, we work across security and frontline operational recruitment, where compliance and vetting are genuinely non-negotiable. Even so, a well-run internal hire should take one to three weeks from advert to offer; external hires typically run to three to five weeks. When hiring takes significantly longer than it should, it is rarely because candidates are being assessed more carefully. It's usually friction caused by diary clashes, slow feedback, layered approvals, and a growing list of people who want to "just meet them too."
Employers and candidates measure the same process differently, and that mismatch is where most of the damage gets done. Internally, recruitment is a full business process and includes budget sign-off, advertising, shortlisting, panel interviews, salary approval, referencing, compliance. To the people running it, a fortnight's delay can look like routine administration. To the candidate, who is judging the process from the moment they applied or interviewed, that same fortnight can feel like silence. And, that silence may be read as disinterest or disorganisation, and not diligence.
Where Delays Actually Come From
The stages themselves don't need to take long. Application review should happen within 48 to 72 hours, a week at most for high-volume campaigns. A first interview within a week of application. A second or final interview within two weeks. A decision and offer within 48 hours of that final conversation. For most roles, two interview stages are genuinely sufficient. A third can be justified for senior, technical, client-facing or regulated positions but a fourth or fifth, in our experience, usually signals indecision rather than diligence, particularly when the new stage is really just another senior manager wanting their own look at the candidate rather than testing something different.
That distinction matters more, not less, in regulated environments. Roles like manned guarding, retail security, event security and mobile patrol - particularly where a candidate already holds an SIA licence - can and should move quickly. Roles in CCTV and control rooms, close protection, data centres, critical infrastructure, defence and government contracts genuinely need more time, because BS7858 and equivalent vetting, covering identity, right-to-work, employment history, financial probity and gap checks, takes time to do properly and shouldn't be rushed. The mistake we see corporates make is applying the same caution-driven pace to every role, when only a minority truly require it. Slowing a retail security hire down to the same degree as a government-cleared one doesn't reduce risk. It just costs you the candidate.
The Cost of Keeping Candidates Waiting
When good candidates are hard to find, you might assume employers would move quickly. In our experience, the reverse tends to be true. And, when faced with a thin pool of candidates, employers often raise the bar further, hold out for an exact-match CV, and keep interviewing "just in case someone better comes along." In our experience, hiring for potential, attitude, licence eligibility and trainability fills roles faster and more reliably than waiting for a perfect candidate to materialise, particularly in markets where good people are already being interviewed elsewhere.
The candidates worth waiting for are usually the ones least willing to wait. We typically see strong candidates stay engaged for two to four weeks if communication is good, however they will disengage far sooner if it isn't. Longer processes tend to lower offer acceptance too as candidates pick up competing offers, lose momentum, or start to read a slow process as a signal of how the organisation actually operates day to day. The cost isn't limited to losing that one candidate, either. Every extra week a role sits vacant means work gets redistributed, covered at overtime rates, or simply delayed, and for client-facing or contract-delivery roles, that can also mean a dent in service levels and client confidence.
What a Faster, Stronger Hiring Process Looks Like
None of this is an argument for rushing. Fast hiring and rigorous hiring aren't opposites as the organisations that manage both are usually the ones that agreed their evidence criteria before the process started, not the ones cutting corners as they go. In practice, that means a clear brief and salary range agreed before advertising, interview slots blocked in advance, a hard cap on interview stages unless there's a specific regulatory reason to go further, feedback deadlines that are enforced, and one person clearly accountable for the final decision.
The real question for employers isn't how long a hiring process should take. It's how quickly the organisation can reach a confident decision once it has the evidence it needs. That's not a problem another interview stage will solve. It's an organisational one. And it's usually the organisations willing to answer it that end up with the candidates everyone else wanted too.