This year we’ve sat in multiple debriefs where a client described the same seat turning over for the second, sometimes third, time in under two years. The clients usually responded in the same way same by attempting to tighten the process, get the shortlist over sooner and to close the vacancy quicker. Speed was treated as the fix, but when we looked closer at these cases, the problem was never how long it took to fill the role.
It was why the role kept emptying out.
This is a distinction worth sitting with, because it’s an easy one to miss. “Hire faster” treats turnover as a supply problem, as if the only issue was getting a person into the seat sooner. In practice, it’s usually a retention problem wearing a supply problem’s clothes. Time-to-fill, time-to-productivity and time-to-stay are three different metrics, and organisations that only track the first one are optimising for the part of the process that was never actually broken.
The costs these hides are significant and rarely make it into the same conversation as “we filled it in three weeks.” Replacing an employee typically costs somewhere between half and double their salary once lost productivity, onboarding hours and manager time are accounted for. A hire who leaves after eight months costs more than one who takes longer to find but stays for three years, because every departure resets the productivity ramp back to zero. Recruitment fees compound with each cycle too, as by the third attempt to fill the same seat, that role has often become one of the most expensive on the team, without anyone framing it that way.
It isn’t only a cost problem. Repeated turnover changes the people who stay. Remaining team members absorb the gap while a seat sits empty, cycle after cycle, and a revolving door burns out the survivors as much as it affects the people leaving. Institutional knowledge erodes faster than it can be rebuilt, and roles with a reputation for high churn start getting quietly declined by the internal candidates best placed to succeed in them.
The damage also travels outward. A role that turns over every year is visible externally, on Glassdoor, on LinkedIn, in the way candidates talk to each other about a company before they ever apply. That reputation raises the bar an organisation must clear with every future hire into that seat. There is more convincing needed in interview, more counteroffers to beat, more scepticism to overcome. Ironically, this makes the “fast” hiring approach slower over time, not faster.
None of this is solved by speed, because speed was never addressing the actual cause. Most attrition traces back to a small set of root issues: unclear role scope, no visible growth path, poor manager fit, expectations that were never properly set at the offer stage, or compensation drifting out of step with the market. A faster search doesn’t touch any of these. If onboarding and expectation-setting weren’t the problem last time, doing them faster next time just gets the organisation to the same exit interview sooner. Worse, a quick refill can actively mask the pattern, because leadership sees the seat filled and reads that as solved, when nobody has actually looked at why it emptied in the first place.
What functions as a retention strategy looks different. It means reviewing exit interview themes at the role and team level, not just as isolated individual departures, so a pattern across three leavers in the same seat gets flagged as a pattern rather than three unrelated stories. It means running stay interviews with current high performers, asking what would make them leave before they’re already looking elsewhere. It means auditing manager quality on high-turnover teams, at the offer stage rather than letting a new hire discover the shape of the role, since a large share of attrition is manager-driven rather than role-driven. It means setting clear 30/60/90-day expectations months in and building career conversations into the first quarter instead of waiting for an annual review that may never come in time.
This is also where a recruitment partner’s role should shift. A good agency should be asking why the last person left before they’re asked how fast the next one can start. Fast fulfilment and durable fulfilment are different services solving different problems and treating them as the same thing is exactly how the cycle repeats itself. At 2mrw Group, when we see a seat that’s turned over more than once in a short period, that’s the conversation we open with, not the search. Sometimes the answer is a hiring fix. Just as often, it’s a question the business hasn’t asked itself yet about the role, the manager, or what “success” was ever defined as for that seat.
If a role on your team keeps needing to be refilled, it may be worth pausing before the next search starts. The question worth asking isn’t how quickly you can hire again. It’s why you keep needing to.
