TLDR: Filling a role may take ~47 days, but real productivity takes 5–6 months. Teams that ship plan around the people they already have, not hires that haven’t ramped yet.
Your recruiting dashboard says 47 days to fill that senior engineer role. Leadership sees the number and thinks you’re six weeks from solving the capacity problem.
You’re not. You’re six months out, maybe longer.
Time-to-hire measures when someone accepts an offer. Time-to-impact measures when they’re actually contributing to the roadmap. The gap between those two numbers is where engineering plans go to die.
Why the Real Number Is 6 Months
Marko V., a CTO, has watched this pattern repeat across companies:
“I’ve seen companies that have such complex tech stacks and tooling that it really takes 90 days to get an engineer up to speed versus others where a good engineer can be very productive within weeks.”
Most companies aren’t in that second category. Their codebases have years of undocumented decisions baked in. Deployment pipelines require tribal knowledge that lives in the heads of two or three people. Architecture diagrams haven’t been updated since 2022.
So the math looks like this: six to eight weeks to source and close a candidate, assuming your first choice doesn’t take a counteroffer and send you back to the beginning. Then 90 days of onboarding, codebase orientation, first small PRs, first real project. You’re looking at five to six months before that hire is delivering at the level you needed when you opened the role.
That feature you promised for Q3? The one that depends on engineers you haven’t hired yet? It’s not shipping in Q3.
The Bungee Cord Effect
Vernon O., a CTO, learned about hiring lag from both directions:
“You hire a bunch for these future plans and then you miss two quarters in. You get the bungee cord effect where you hire a bunch and then you have to fire a bunch.”
The lag makes capacity planning nearly impossible. When you need people, you can’t get them fast enough. By the time they’re ramped, the market has shifted or the project has changed. You overshoot, then overcorrect, then overshoot again.
Meanwhile, your existing team absorbs the work. Sprint velocity drops. Your best engineers start mentioning they’re tired. One updates their LinkedIn. A recruiter reaches out. Now you have two open roles instead of one.
Taran L., a VP of Engineering, avoided this trap on a major product launch by refusing to depend on new hires:
“For this effort, we really tried to put our best people on it. Those were our US teams that have really high domain experience.”
He didn’t build three new teams for the launch. He redeployed existing talent because hiring would have blown the timeline. That option only existed because he’d built bench strength before he urgently needed it.
The Diagnostic Question
Here’s the question worth asking in your next planning session: What roadmap commitments have you made that depend on engineers who aren’t hired yet?
If the answer is “none,” you’re planning with the team you have. That’s sustainable.
If the answer is “Q3 depends on two senior hires we haven’t started sourcing,” you don’t have a roadmap. You have a wish list.
The difference between engineering leaders who consistently deliver and those who consistently miss isn’t hiring speed. Robert E., a VP of Engineering, builds his pipeline before roles open:
“Our approach has been a pretty wide network of people I know in the engineering space. I’ve either worked with them before or I know their work.”
By the time he needs someone, he already knows three people who’d be perfect. The sourcing phase that takes most companies six weeks takes him a phone call.
Your competitors who ship faster aren’t hiring faster. They stopped measuring time-to-hire and started measuring time-to-impact. They built networks before they needed them. They made roadmap commitments based on the team that exists, not the team they hope to have.
The recruiting dashboard says 47 days. The question is whether you’re planning around that number or the real one.
The Real Hiring Timeline, from Sonatafy’s Engineering Intelligence Hub. Insights drawn from over 160 CTO interviews on Software Leaders UNCENSORED. Practical tools for technical leaders navigating capacity planning and team scaling. Explore more at sonatafy.com/software-solution-directory/
