Experience

Recruitment

A hiring freeze that lasts one quarter can leave an operational team short for most of a year. Budget for the recovery, not just the saving.

Insights and thoughts Andrew Wood

Technical recruitment routinely takes three to six months, and that assumes your first-choice candidate doesn’t take a counter-offer the week before they’re due to start. Even getting to a shortlist takes longer now. Between candidates using AI to mass-produce tailored applications and recruitment systems using automated filters that reject anyone missing a specific keyword, the hiring process has turned into an arms race that feels increasingly broken.

Once someone actually starts, proper onboarding takes another three to six months before they know your customers, your tooling and your estate well enough to carry their full weight.

Without a proper succession plan, a knee-jerk hiring freeze that lasts a single quarter can leave an operational team short for the best part of a year before leadership realises why delivery is creaking. And the damage isn’t spread evenly. Senior engineering roles take the longest to fill, and they’re the exact people the rest of the team leans on for escalations.

If you have to freeze hiring, do it knowing what the recovery will actually cost. That means budgeting for the months of lost capacity and the burnout risk on the people left holding the queue, alongside the salary line you saved on the spreadsheet.