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The Hidden Cost of Delay: How Slow Hiring Is Derailing Enterprise Change Programs

In large IT services and consulting organisations, the calendar is often the enemy of transformation. For mid-senior engineering and operations managers running change programs at 10,000+ employee firms, every week a key role sits vacant is a week of delayed deliverables, overloaded teams, and rising program costs.

The numbers show this is not a hypothetical risk – it’s a measurable drag on outcomes that smart leaders can fix.

Why time-to-hire matters more than ever

Hiring has become slower and more interview-heavy. Recruiters now run many more interviews per hire than they did just a few years ago, and that extra process length is adding up: overall time-to-hire increased roughly 24% since 2021, driven in part by an average rise in interviews-per-hire. (source)

Typical hiring cycles for major IT Services and IT Consulting companies

  • Amazon‘s typical hiring cycle for mid-senior hires: up to 5 weeks
  • Accenture’s typical hiring cycle for mid-senior hires: up to 6 weeks
  • Cognizant’s typical hiring cycle for mid-senior hires: up to 6 weeks
  • Google‘s typical hiring cycle for mid-senior hires: up to 7 weeks
  • NVIDIA’s typical hiring cycle for mid-senior hires: up to 8 weeks
  • IBM’s typical hiring cycle for mid-senior hires: up to 8 weeks

Worse, 60% of companies reported increased time-to-hire in 2024 – only 6% reported improvements – meaning delays are widespread across industries. That slowdown creates three direct problems for enterprise change programs:

  1. Delayed project milestones
  2. Higher unit costs for work that can’t be completed
  3. Greater risk of losing top candidates to faster competitors. (source)

The third is particularly dangerous, as this can be at the very end of the process, with considerable internal man-hours, interviews, and rejections having already taken place, compounding the cost & time of the first two problems.

The business cost of delay: not just recruitment fees

The real cost of a late hire goes beyond agency fees. For transformation projects, vacant roles mean:

  • Lost velocity – sprints slip, integrations lag, vendor milestones delay.
  • Hidden labour costs – scope shifts to existing staff, increasing overtime, and burnout.
  • Opportunity costs – new capabilities (AI features, cloud migrations, automation) are postponed, eroding competitive position.

McKinsey’s body of work on transformations has repeatedly highlighted that execution – not vision – is the main reason projects fail; poor resourcing and slow capability build are common culprits. In aggregate, failed or delayed transformations cost the global economy hundreds of billions annually. (source)

How modern hiring problems create program risk

Three recruiting dynamics amplify risk for enterprise programs today:

  1. Longer, more fragmented interview processes. More interview stages increase candidate drop-off and slow decisions. Gem’s 2025 benchmarks show interviews per hire and days-to-hire have risen materially. (source)
  2. Underused recruiting specialists. Organisations that use recruiters in hiring typically move faster: external recruiters like EGI that specialise in hiring mid-senior level IT engineering and operations professionals in key growth regions will have a network of passive candidates who have been impactful at competing companies for specific transformation projects.
  3. Shift to flexible resourcing. Contract and fractional talent are becoming mainstream for transformation work; firms without a flexible bench end up either hiring slowly or overstaffing permanent roles. (This trend shortens time-to-productivity when leveraged correctly.) (source)

What senior engineering & operations leaders should do (practical game plan)

If you lead transformation or restructuring, here are high-impact actions to cut hiring time and reduce program risk – without sacrificing hire quality:

1. Prebuild capability pipelines for transformation-critical roles.
Don’t wait for headcount approval. Maintain a curated bench of vetted cloud, DevOps, data, and systems integration engineers – as we mentioned in our last article, these are people who can plug into projects quickly. This reduces time-to-productivity and prevents backlog.

2. Condense and parallelise interview loops.
Replace five sequential interviews with two parallel streams (technical + stakeholder fit) that converge. That reduces calendar churn and lowers candidate dropout without weakening assessment quality.

3. Use skills simulations, not just CV screens
Short, relevant simulations (pair programming sessions, architecture design exercises) surface real capability faster than long CV reviews – and they’re better predictors of on-the-job performance.

4. Adopt AI & or external consultants for triage
External sourcing, resume-matching, and calendar orchestration remove admin friction internally and save days in scheduling and shortlisting. Benchmarked data show recruiters & some form of AI usage cut hiring time significantly. (Source)

5. Blend contract-to-perm pathways into plans
If speed is essential, hire contractors for an initial 3–6 month term with a conversion pathway. This de-risks cultural fit and preserves momentum on transformation deliverables.

Quick metrics to track (recommended KPIs)

  • Time-to-offer (days) – target: reduce by 30% in first 3 months
  • Offer acceptance rate (%) – target: ≥70% for critical roles
  • Time from open → first qualified interview (days) — target: ≤7 days
  • Source-to-hire efficiency – which channels deliver fastest, best candidates

How Experts Group International helps

If you’re running an enterprise transformation, we partner with heads of engineering and ops to close these gaps quickly. Our consultants are specialists across:

Final thought

In transformation work, calendars kill more projects than technology. The organisations that win are those that treat hiring velocity as a core delivery metric and design recruitment as part of the change plan – not an afterthought. For mid-senior engineering and operations leaders in large IT services firms, the reward for fixing hiring speed is simple: faster outcomes, lower cost, and projects that actually deliver stated objectives.

Want help benchmarking your hiring process or building a ready-now bench for your next transformation sprint?

📩 Clients: Book a 30-minute Hiring Efficiency Audit with Experts Group International.
📩 Candidates: Join our network to apply for senior engineering transformation roles.

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