Role Open More Than 90 Days? It Might Not Be a Recruiting Problem
Updated July 10, 2026
Try a quick puzzle. There’s a rational, logical reason for the order of these numbers. Take a minute and see if you can find it:
8 5 4 9 1 7 6 3 2 0
According to Dr. Alan Weiss, the consultant who writes about this sequence, only about one in twenty people solve it. Most attack it as a math problem: differences, patterns, formulas. The answer has nothing to do with math. The numbers are in alphabetical order.
Once you label a problem, you’ve set the limits on your ability to solve it. If you’re solving a “numbers problem” and the answer is alphabetical, no mathematician will get you there.
The Label Picks the Solutions
Sales leaders do this under pressure. The team misses its number for a few quarters, someone labels it a training problem, and the search for solutions begins: better training, different trainers, higher-profile trainers. When results stay flat, nobody questions the label. They just shop for more training, because every new idea has to fit inside the category the label created.
The same thing happens with open roles.
Is It Really a Recruiting Problem?
When there’s no one to do a job, it gets labeled a recruiting problem. Sometimes it is one. And sometimes the real problem is:
- Compensation that’s out of market
- A hiring manager with hiring reluctance
- Leadership problems, which come in all shapes and sizes
- A broken position profile
- Three jobs masquerading as one role. The person who can do it all doesn’t exist.
- An interview cadence that’s out of sync
- A search nobody treats as urgent
No amount of recruiting fixes those, because recruiting was never the problem.
The Hamburger and the Steak
We ran a search for an Enterprise rep where every candidate who came in missed the Enterprise requirement. Over and over, the same result. The reason was sitting in the job description: the salary was mid-market. The role was priced for a hamburger, and the client wanted a steak, and no recruiting effort on earth turns one into the other.
The fix had nothing to do with sourcing. The client raised the compensation, and the candidates started meeting the requirement. The talent pool corrected itself, because the pool was never the problem. The price of admission was.
That search had been labeled a recruiting problem. It was a comp problem wearing a recruiting problem’s clothes.
The 90-Day Postmortem
Next time a role has been open for more than 90 days, stop and run a postmortem before spending another week on it. Review every candidate interviewed, the position profile, and the history of the role, from responsibilities to compensation. Ask what the pattern in the rejections is telling you. If every candidate misses the same requirement, the requirement and the offer probably don’t match.
If the postmortem says the problem really is recruiting, there’s a separate diagnosis for that: the reasons your recruiter isn’t finding candidates. But find out which problem you have first. Launching a search without knowing is how roles stay open for a year, and a good specialist will tell you the truth about which one it is before taking your money.
