I hear this all the time from managers:

"Recruitment isn't doing their job right." "Shortlists aren't coming on time." "There aren't enough candidates." "The candidates they send are terrible." "It's so hard to find good people."

And then the question: "What can I do to make them move faster?"

Here's the uncomfortable truth: you're probably the bottleneck.

Not because you're slow to respond. But because you've unknowingly made your mandate harder to work on than everyone else's.

Hiring is a delegated job, not an abdicated job.

You've handed the sourcing and coordination to someone else. But when they're struggling to deliver, it's still your accountability to make it work.

In most organizations, your recruiter is juggling multiple stakeholders — all equally convinced their role is the most urgent. Pressure doesn't work. Escalation doesn't work. Going higher up the chain might get you a short-term win, but it's not sustainable.

The only way to consistently get your hiring done on time is to become the path of least resistance.

Not by lowering your bar. By reducing the friction you've created.

When your recruiter sends you a list of candidates, how do you respond?

If you say things like "the third one looks interesting" or "reject the guy from Bangalore" — you've just created work. They have to cross-reference, open multiple tabs, figure out who you mean.

Small friction. But multiplied across all their mandates, yours keeps slipping down the priority list.

Make every interaction self-contained. Every email should have the requisition number, candidate name, and a clickable link to their profile. If you're shortlisting 3 out of 10, send back those 3 with links — not "numbers 2, 5, and 7."

They should be able to act on your message without opening anything else. Even in their lowest-energy moment, yours becomes the easy one to pick up.

Most hiring managers give a job description and hope the recruiter figures out what they actually want. Then they reject 6 out of 8 shortlisted candidates and wonder why progress is slow.

The problem: you have filters you haven't articulated. Patterns you recognize but haven't verbalized. Signals that make you say "not this one" without being able to explain why.

Here's what I do instead — and I do this for every role, every time:

Sit down for 30 minutes before sourcing begins. Walk them through:

Then do a live exercise: pull up profiles together. Ask them, "Would you shortlist this one for me?"

When they pick one you'd reject, you're forced to verbalize why. This surfaces filters you didn't know you had. And it teaches them to see what you see.

After this session, rejection rates on shortlists drop dramatically. You're no longer wasting cycles on back-and-forth. The sourcing becomes sharper from day one.

In a chaotic environment, you're one of many voices demanding attention. The recruiters who work with me know I'll show up every week with one question:

"What's troubling you on this mandate? What can I do to make it easier for you to help me?"

Not "where are my candidates?" Not "why is this taking so long?"

This question does two things:

Over time, this changes how they prioritize. When they have limited energy, they'll pick the mandate where the hiring manager makes their life easier. That's you.

Don't wait for updates. Own the visibility.

Set up a simple tracker:

Nothing fancy. But now you can see exactly where things are stuck — and so can they.

I've shared a template that you can use — make a copy here.

More importantly, it shifts the dynamic. You're not chasing. You're co-owning.

When hiring feels slow, don't ask "why isn't this moving?" Ask "where is it stuck?"

Each stage of the funnel has a benchmark. If you're below it, there's a specific root cause — and a specific fix.

Don't guess. Diagnose.

You can't control the talent market. You can't control how many mandates your recruiter is juggling. You can't magically make great candidates appear.

But you can control whether you're easy to work with. Whether you've transferred your mental model. Whether you're showing up as a partner or just another source of pressure.

Hiring is a delegated job, not an abdicated job. Take ownership of making the delegation work.

This is how I get my people hired on time.

What's your biggest hiring friction right now? I'd love to hear what's worked — or not worked — for you.

~Discovering Turiya@work@life.