[adrianhoward]

I still see some companies take a long time to fill tech roles.

It's the difference between companies who really know what they're looking for, and those who the "best" person but aren't quite sure what that is.

The former will hire as soon as they meet somebody who can do the job.

The latter will dither until they have a few possibles. Then dither some more weighing up the various pros and cons... by which time their best candidate has gone.

In the worst cases they then reject all their other candidates (since they're "worse" than the best candidate they've just lost) and start the whole process again!

[bartonfink]

I think you're absolutely right, Adrian. If you aren't sure what specific role you'd like someone to be able to fill, you're just a window shopper, and serious candidates aren't going to wait for you to make up your mind. For every req, you've got to be able to answer the ? "What, specifically, do we need this person to do?" That's a functional ? - it's not enough to say "This person needs to be able to code in .NET " like many BigCorps do.

It astounds me how hard many organizations can find it to answer that ?, though. Even if you set up a company that espoused a "we'll hire as many smart people as we can get" policy, you could still say "Immediately, we need someone to work on the performance of our frobnosticator, so they'll need to know Java classloaders REALLY well." That's specific enough that you can know "we found our engineer" when they show up, and doesn't use a lame proxy for knowledge like years of experience (there are certainly Java developers out there with 15 years of experience who know nothing about classloaders).