Why your recruitment process is losing top talent
By Rob Pegg · July 2026
Most businesses that struggle to hire good operational leaders believe they have a talent problem. Having sat on both sides of the table for twenty-five years, I can tell you that a fair share of them actually have a process problem. The candidates were there. The process lost them.
Speed is a filter, whether you like it or not
Strong candidates run their own process in parallel with yours. Every week of delay between stages removes the most in-demand people from your shortlist and leaves you choosing from the remainder. If your process takes six weeks and your competitor's takes two, you are not running a more rigorous process. You are running a slower one, and the outcome will show it.
Interviews that test the wrong thing
A polished interview performance tells you the candidate is good at interviews. It tells you very little about whether they can hold a P&L, run a peak, or walk a floor and see what is actually happening. If your interviews are generic competency questions, you are selecting for articulacy, and the market is full of articulate people who cannot run an operation. Test the job: the numbers they will own, the team they will inherit, the problems currently sitting on the site.
The salary conversation you're avoiding
If the package is below market, the process cannot fix that, and every stage you add just delays the moment the candidate finds out. Deal with money early and honestly. Candidates do not resent a straight conversation about budget. They resent discovering the gap at offer stage after four interviews.
Silence reads as disinterest
Every gap in communication is filled by the candidate's imagination and your competitor's phone calls. A weekly update costs nothing. Losing a shortlist because nobody spoke to them for a fortnight costs a restart.
The fix is ownership
Processes lose candidates when nobody owns the outcome. One accountable person, a decision timeline agreed before the search starts, interviews built around the actual role, and honesty about money from the first conversation. None of that is sophisticated. It is discipline, which is precisely why it is rare, and why the businesses that have it hire the people everyone else wanted.