When a senior role has been open for six months, the usual conclusion is that the market is short of good people. Sometimes that’s true. More often, the market has been giving the business useful information for months, and nobody has been in a position to act on it.

I see this most often with appointments that matter: an associate who will lead a discipline, a technical leader for a growing office, a senior hire a project can’t start without. These roles rarely stall for one dramatic reason. They stall because several small assumptions go unchallenged while the weeks pass.

The brief describes a position, not a problem

Most searches begin with a job title. A title tells you where someone sits in a structure. It doesn’t tell you what has to change once they arrive.

An Associate could be there to win work, carry technical authority, develop a team or secure succession. Those are different appointments, and they may attract different people. Until the business decides which outcome matters most, every CV gets judged against a slightly different idea of the role.

The visible market gets used up quickly

In a specialist market, the people who are actively looking can be counted fairly quickly. Advertising reaches them. So does every recruiter working the same brief.

Adding more agencies rarely adds much more market. It usually puts the same names in front of the same employer, and it means capable people hear about the role several times from several directions. By month three, the opportunity can start to feel stale, even when it isn’t.

The better candidate is often not looking. That person needs a considered approach and a clear reason to take the conversation seriously.

Feedback arrives too late to be useful

A role that isn’t attracting the right people is producing evidence. Candidates may be hesitating over salary, location, reporting line, title or the scope of the job. If that feedback is informal or scattered across several conversations, it never becomes a decision.

Six months later, the business is left with the same brief and a growing sense of frustration. I would much rather tell a client in week two that the role needs to change than help them discover it in month six.

Nobody owns the outcome

This is the issue I see most often. HR is managing several priorities. The hiring manager is covering the workload. Recruiters are working the parts of the market they can reach quickly. Everyone is busy, and yet nobody is accountable for the appointment being made.

Critical roles need one person responsible for defining the requirement, covering the market and bringing the evidence back to the people who can act on it.

What changed on one six-month search

An Irish multidisciplinary engineering and environmental consultancy had an Associate Director, Structural role open for more than six months. Multiple agencies had already worked the brief, and the same small pool of names had been circulating without result.

We didn’t repeat the search. We re-mapped it, looking across the wider market for people with the right calibre, including people who weren’t looking and had never been approached.

From initial brief to signed contract took five weeks.

That result didn’t come from speed for its own sake. It came from changing where we looked and how the opportunity was taken to the market.

Five questions to ask before a role goes live

Most of this can be avoided before anyone goes to market. Before a critical role goes live, I would ask:

1. What must this person make possible in their first 12 months?
2. Where does the required capability exist, and which parts of the market must be covered?
3. Why would the right person, who isn’t looking, consider this role?
4. Are the salary, location, title and scope realistic for this market?
5. Who will be accountable for getting this appointment made?

If those questions are difficult to answer, the role isn’t ready to go to market. An hour spent on them now can save months later.

A role that has been open for six months can feel like a recruitment problem. It is often a sign that the work has never been properly defined, or that nobody has been given responsibility for finishing it.