Finding skilled talent is as much about what happens after the final interview as it is about finding the talent. When a hire takes longer than it should, it’s easy to doubt your recruiter or blame it on a lack of skilled talent. The brilliant candidates are out there – but is your sign-off process sending the right signal?
Why This Bottleneck Is Easy To Miss
From the inside, sign-off may not feel like an issue. You pay close attention to how long it takes for a shortlist to land in your inbox, and how fast a recruiter gets back to you with updates. You expect your recruiter to solve your hiring gaps. But it’s easy to forget that closing a candidate quickly is just as much your job as theirs. Too often, we’ve seen hiring managers delay feedback or sign-off, only to miss the exact candidate they needed for the role.
These Founders Find Talent Fast
This isn’t one recruiter’s opinion. Across searches spanning cleared defense roles to early-stage software teams, we’ve seen the same thing. Long processes, slow feedback, and roles that stall mid-search for weeks at a time are the top reasons a hire drags on, and founders are often unaware of the role they play in hiring delays.
The clients who access the best talent quickly do two things. They provide feedback quickly, and they do it well. A one-word response like “pass” or “not quite” doesn’t tell a recruiter how to adjust their search for the next round. “Liked their systems background, want to see more hands-on testing experience” is great, because the recruiter can go find exactly that instead. Speed without detail still stalls things.
The Search is The Easy Part if You Know What You’re Looking For
You might expect finding niche talent to be the biggest bottleneck in recruiting for space companies. But often, the paperwork is the problem. All you need is a well-scoped job description and a recruiter who knows what to look for. At EVONA, a strong shortlist comes together quickly, often within the first week.
But the main thing that stops a great hire from happening is slow sign-off. This looks like the paperwork sitting on a hiring manager’s desk while the candidate continues interviewing elsewhere. A role that goes unattended for a few weeks does the same damage.
The Cost of Slow Sign-Off
Because candidates don’t have insight into your schedule, they experience your lack of speed as a sign that you’re not interested, and they move on. A fast reply reads as genuine interest. In one case, EVONA filled a software engineering job in 9 days, with only the offer outstanding. The client’s own sign-off then took another 21 to 22 days, more than twice as long as the search itself.
In specialities where the shortlist is genuinely small, like propulsion, avionics and RF, delaying sign-off could mean losing the one candidate you liked. That means starting from scratch again. Strong candidates don’t wait for you to approve their offer. The company that responds fastest is very often the one that wants to hire the most.
What Your Fastest-Closing Competitors Do Differently
At seed and Series A, solid hiring processes go a long way in securing the right candidates. You can create a sign-off process candidates will say yes to. That means deciding in advance who reviews the shortlist, and committing to a feedback turnaround before the search starts.
And fewer people in the loop means fewer places for a decision to get stuck. The clients who hire fastest are the ones where the CEO or CTO reviews the shortlist directly, instead of a hiring manager whose plate is too full.
This doesn’t mean you have to rush a decision. First, it’s important to draft a clear job description. It also means deciding, before the search starts, how fast you’ll move once the right person is in front of you. The space talent market isn’t getting any less competitive. One thing you do have control over is how long you take to say yes.