The symptoms are obvious. The causes are not.
Most founders know when their hiring is not working. Roles stay open for months. Good candidates disappear. The people you do hire sometimes do not work out. But identifying exactly where the process breaks down is harder than it looks.
Here are seven signs that your recruiting process needs attention, along with the root causes that typically drive each one.
1. Candidates ghost you after the first interview
If candidates are interested enough to take a first call but disappear before the second round, something is happening in that first interaction that is turning them off.
Common causes: the role was not clearly explained, the interviewer was unprepared or unengaged, the process timeline was vague ("we will get back to you"), or there was a long gap between the first interview and the next step. Candidates interpret silence as disinterest.
Fix: Audit your first-round experience. What exactly happens in that call? Is the interviewer selling the role as much as evaluating the candidate? Are next steps clearly communicated? Follow up within 48 hours with a concrete next step or a clear rejection.
2. You keep losing candidates to competing offers
When candidates consistently choose another company over yours, it is worth investigating whether the issue is compensation, speed, or experience.
Sometimes the answer is simple: your offer is not competitive. But more often, the issue is speed. The other company made their decision two weeks before you did. Or the candidate felt more valued during the other company's process, where they received faster responses, more transparency, and a more engaging interview experience.
Fix: Track your time from first contact to offer. If it is over 21 days, you are likely losing candidates to faster-moving competitors. Also ask candidates who decline: what was the deciding factor? You will learn more from those conversations than from any survey.
3. Your offer acceptance rate is below 70%
If more than 30% of your offers are being declined, there is a disconnect somewhere. Either you are misjudging candidate interest, your offers are not competitive, or something happens between the final interview and the offer that cools the candidate's enthusiasm.
A common culprit: the time between final interview and offer. If you take a week to get internal alignment and make the offer, the candidate has spent that week wondering if you are interested. Their excitement fades. Competing options solidify.
Fix: Get alignment on compensation before the final interview so you can move to an offer within 24 to 48 hours of the decision. Set expectations during the process: "If we move forward, you will have an offer by Thursday." Then deliver on that promise.
4. New hires are not working out
If you have a pattern of hires who underperform or leave within the first year, the problem is almost certainly in your evaluation process. You are consistently misjudging something, whether that is technical ability, cultural fit, or the candidate's alignment with what the role actually requires.
Fix: Do a post-mortem on your last three hires who did not work out. What did the interview assess? What was missed? Where was the gap between what you expected and what you got? Use these insights to adjust your interview scorecard and questions.
5. You are only seeing mediocre candidates
If every resume that comes in feels underwhelming, the problem is usually your sourcing, not the talent market. Strong candidates are rarely active job seekers. They are not scrolling job boards. They need to be found and approached directly.
If you are relying entirely on inbound applications, you are seeing a self-selected subset of the market: people who are actively looking. That pool skews toward people who are out of work, unhappy in their current role, or early in their career. The best candidates are usually happily employed and not thinking about switching unless someone gives them a compelling reason to.
Fix: Shift at least 50% of your effort to outbound sourcing. Identify the people you actually want to hire and reach out directly. This requires dedicated time and effort, which is one of the main reasons startups bring in recruiting help.
6. Your team is burned out from covering open roles
When hiring takes too long, the existing team picks up the slack. One person absorbing an extra 20% of work for a month is manageable. The same person doing it for four months is a retention risk. If your team is showing signs of burnout tied to open positions, your recruiting timeline is directly causing a second problem.
Fix: Treat time-to-fill as a business-critical metric, not a nice-to-have. Set a target (most startups should aim for 21 to 35 days) and track it. When a role exceeds the target, escalate it: bring in additional sourcing help, adjust the requirements, or raise the compensation.
7. Nobody owns the process
This is the root cause behind many of the other symptoms. Recruiting works when someone wakes up every day thinking about your open roles, moves candidates through the pipeline, and is accountable for results. When that responsibility is shared among five people who all have other priorities, it does not actually belong to anyone.
This does not mean you need a full-time recruiter. But someone needs to own the process end to end: sourcing, screening, scheduling, following up, and closing. If nobody owns it, everything else breaks.
Fix: Designate a single owner for recruiting. This could be a founder, an ops team member, a part-time recruiter, or an embedded recruiting partner. The title does not matter. What matters is that one person is responsible for keeping the process moving and is measured on outcomes.
Diagnosing your specific situation
These seven signs rarely appear in isolation. A broken process typically shows multiple symptoms because the root causes are interconnected. Slow hiring leads to burned-out teams, which leads to rushed interviews, which leads to bad hires, which leads to more open roles.
The fix is not to address each symptom individually. It is to step back and rebuild the fundamentals: clear ownership, a structured process, dedicated sourcing, and speed at every stage.