In many organizations, a 90-day hiring cycle for a senior engineer is considered normal. But this acceptance of slowness masks a significant financial drain on the business. An open, critical engineering role is not a passive line item; it's an active liability that costs you money every single day. This article breaks down the true financial cost of a slow hiring process and makes the case for speed as a critical business metric. The core tension is that companies often focus on the cost of a hire but ignore the much larger cost of a vacancy.
Direct costs the productivity drain
The most immediate cost is the work that is not getting done. This has a cascading effect across the entire engineering organization.
- Delayed projects. A single vacancy on a five-person team can reduce that team's velocity by 20% or more, directly delaying feature launches and product releases.
- Team burnout. The remaining team members must pick up the slack, leading to overwork, decreased morale, and an increased risk of attrition among your existing high-performers.
- Management overhead. Your engineering managers spend a disproportionate amount of their time trying to manage around the vacancy instead of coaching their team and driving projects forward.
Indirect costs the revenue impact
The costs of a slow hiring process extend far beyond the engineering department and directly impact your bottom line.
- Missed revenue. If a delayed feature was projected to generate $100,000 in new monthly recurring revenue, a three-month delay costs you $300,000 in lost top-line growth.
- Competitive disadvantage. While you are struggling to fill a role, your more agile competitors are shipping product and capturing market share.
- Recruitment costs. A longer hiring cycle often involves more ad spend, higher recruiter fees, and hundreds of hours of wasted interview time from your most valuable engineers.
How a strategic partner creates speed
The solution to this problem is to fundamentally change your hiring model from a slow, reactive process to a fast, proactive one. This is what a partnership with Howdy.com is designed to do.
- Access to a pre-vetted pool. We eliminate the most time-consuming part of the process: sourcing and screening. You get immediate access to a curated community of engineers who have already cleared a rigorous technical and professional bar.
- A 2-to-3-week timeline. Our model is built for speed. We can take you from a defined need to a signed offer in as little as two to three weeks, compared to the 90-day industry average. This speed directly translates into faster time-to-market and a significant ROI.
Conclusion
A 90-day hiring cycle is not a benchmark; it's a liability. The vacancy cost of a single senior engineering role can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, far outweighing any perceived savings from a slow and deliberative process. Howdy.com was built to solve this problem. We provide the speed and quality you need to fill critical roles in weeks, not months, ensuring your teams are always fully staffed and firing on all cylinders.