The Time Sink Nobody Talks About: Why Hiring Fatigue Is Draining Your Best People

Tags: Hiring Systems & Strategy · Recruiter Challenges · Burnout & Fatigue

Introduction: The Hiring Task That Never Ends

Hiring does not feel hard because you lack skill. It feels hard because it never stops, and it drains your energy in ways that are hard to see until you feel them in your bones.
This is the unseen cost many leaders ignore, yet it is eating away at focus, purpose, and patience across roles and teams.

Imagine hiring as a hosepipe attached to a powerful source of water. If that hose is fitted to a water cannon and turned on a crowd, it scatters people, disrupts the ground, and causes more harm than good. But if that same water is directed through a well-designed sprinkler system, it nurtures growth, creates life, and brings stability.

Hiring is like that too. The stream of applicants is constant. When it is channelled poorly, it damages morale and decision-making. When it is guided well, it feeds the team and helps the organisation thrive.

The question is not whether the water will flow, it will. The question is how we direct it.

1. The Summer That Felt Never-Ending

In the UK hospitality sector, summer is more than a busy season, it is an unbroken stretch of high demand, high pressure, and high staff turnover. The crowds pour in, the tables fill, and the roster of staff must keep pace. That is the season when you need your seasonal hires, and that is when the hosepipe is blasting at full force.

I have had weeks where half of my working hours were given over to hiring. Not leading, not improving systems, not serving customers, hiring. Ten to twenty interviews in a week. Four or five new staff to onboard at the same time.

It was never neatly contained inside the working day. If someone was part-time, they often had a nine-to-five job elsewhere, so the only time they could be onboarded was in the evening. That meant I would start my shift at nine in the morning, finish at five, grab a quick meal, and then return to onboard a new team member at seven. I would be home by ten at night, ready to repeat the process the next day.

These were not quick “sign here” onboardings either. In hospitality, especially in licensed premises, training matters. I would walk them through the licensing requirements, give them a pack with their uniform and essentials, and answer their questions. I did this because I believed the first interaction with a new hire sets the tone for how they see the job and the team.

It was the right thing to do. It was also exhausting.

2. The Ripple Effect: How Fatigue Becomes Escalation

When you are short-staffed, the strain on the existing team is immediate and obvious. In our busiest months, a fully staffed Saturday night might require 22 people. If only 18 were available, it meant every shift was stretched thin. Orders took longer, service standards slipped, tempers frayed.

The staff felt it. They could see the shortfall, and they knew it was not being fixed overnight. That knowledge changes people’s mindset. Instead of feeling part of a team moving forward, they feel trapped in a cycle that is getting worse. And once that feeling takes hold, some start to leave.

Every departure adds another hiring need. More interviews, more onboarding, more time drained from the core role. This is how fatigue escalates into a self-sustaining loop. The more you hire, the more you need to hire. The more you onboard, the more you will have to onboard.

In theory, leaders should step in and break that cycle. In practice, too many accept it as a fact of life.

3. The Emotional Weight of the Applicant Experience

Even in the busiest weeks, I tried to ensure that every candidate I interviewed got a response. I know the anxiety of applying for a job and waiting in silence. Without a reply, there is no closure, and people are left to second-guess themselves.

Yet I was not perfect. There were times I could not get back to everyone. That bothered me. Not just because it might hurt my reputation, but because it felt wrong to leave someone in the dark.

Hiring managers and recruiters with empathy feel this too. They know they are ghosting candidates, and they dislike it. But they simply cannot keep up. Systems that should help, like applicant tracking systems (ATS), rarely solve the feedback problem. Most are designed for internal tracking, not for maintaining a human connection with applicants.

The result is a process that drains both sides. The applicant feels ignored. The hiring manager feels guilty. The organisation gains a reputation it may never fully see, but which can influence future customers and candidates alike.

4. Why “Just Part of the Job” Is a Strategic Mistake

There is a mindset among some leaders that hiring fatigue is just part of the role. “It is what it is,” they say. That view is not only outdated, it is strategically damaging.

If your brand claims to value people, then every touchpoint with a person should reflect that, including rejected applicants. To ignore this is to create a gap between your stated values and your lived actions. People notice.

I have experienced this from the other side. Years ago, when I was unhappy in a job, I applied to a few local businesses I admired. They ignored my application completely. I have never set foot in those places again. I have told friends why. That is unintentional brand damage that lasts far beyond the missed hire.

Simon Sinek has often said that your first customers are your employees. If you tell a hiring manager, “deal with it,” you are telling one of your customers that their wellbeing does not matter. You are creating a service gap inside your own organisation. And if you think that gap will not influence the way they serve your external customers, you are mistaken.

5. The Hosepipe in Action: A Framing Device

Think again about that hosepipe. The water is the flow of applicants. You cannot stop it. In high-demand roles, the flow is heavy.

If the hosepipe is attached to a water cannon, the result is chaotic, too much force, no precision, scattering energy everywhere. Hiring feels like that when you are sifting through 100 CVs to find five people worth speaking to.

But if you attach the same hose to a sprinkler, the water is distributed evenly and gently. It nurtures the right places. It feeds the soil that will produce growth.

The difference is not the water. It is the direction, control, and delivery. That is what hiring needs, tools and processes that take the same inflow and turn it into something manageable, focused, and constructive.

6. The Financial Weight of Poorly Managed Hiring

The fatigue is bad enough. But the financial impact compounds the problem.

Paraphrased from multiple studies:

• The average cost to hire a new employee can easily exceed £3,500 once you factor in recruitment, screening, interviews, and onboarding.

• Time-to-hire averages around 40 to 44 days, during which productivity suffers and revenue opportunities may be missed.

• A bad hire can cost 30 per cent of that person’s first-year salary, not including the cultural damage of a poor fit.

• In surveys, around three-quarters of employers admit they have made a wrong hire, and many have done so multiple times.

This is not just a problem for high-turnover roles. Senior hires are fewer, but the stakes are higher. A mismatch at that level can undo months of progress and demoralise an entire department.

7. A Week Without Help: Before the Tool

To understand the lived cost, let’s walk through a fictional but realistic week for a hospitality hiring manager in summer, without support.

Monday: Post three job adverts, answer queries from candidates, review 20 new CVs. Schedule interviews. Run a lunchtime team meeting that gets interrupted twice by walk-ins asking about vacancies.

Tuesday: Four interviews back-to-back. Spend the afternoon covering a short-staffed shift. After closing, onboard a part-timer from 7 to 9 pm.

Wednesday: Another 15 CVs in the inbox. Shortlist 10. Call six for interviews. Handle a customer complaint that stemmed from a slow service caused by being two people down.

Thursday: Three interviews. One no-show. Paperwork for a new hire. Help the bar during peak lunch rush because a shift was left uncovered.

Friday: Six interviews starting at 9 am. No lunch break. Stay late to train two new hires.

By Saturday morning, the manager is tired before the shift starts. They still have two onboarding sessions next week, and 20 more CVs to check. This is what fatigue looks like. Not to mention the looming Saturday night shift!

8. A Week With Support: After the Tool

Now, the same manager with an AI-powered screening and feedback tool in place:

Monday: Post vacancies through the system. By the afternoon, it has scanned incoming CVs, ranked them against set criteria, and sent polite decline messages to unqualified applicants.

Tuesday: Review a shortlist of five pre-screened candidates. Schedule interviews. Spend the rest of the day with the team.

Wednesday: Three interviews, all highly relevant to the role. One standout candidate receives an offer. The system automatically updates the status of other applicants and sends tailored feedback.

Thursday: Use the time saved to run a skills workshop for the existing team, improving service quality.

Friday: Two interviews and a quick onboarding of one hire in the afternoon. Leave on time.

This is not fantasy. It is what happens when the hosepipe is fitted with a sprinkler head. The flow is the same, but it is directed and purposeful.

9. The Ideal State and the Human Outcome

In the ideal state, hiring managers are not drowning in process. They are making thoughtful decisions with energy to spare. They have time to see the candidates as people, not as lines in a spreadsheet.

They can close loops with applicants, preserve relationships, and protect the organisation’s reputation. They can focus on the human part of hiring, the conversations, the cultural fit, the judgement calls.

Efficiency here is not about squeezing more output from fewer hours. It is about creating the mental and emotional space for better human outcomes.

10. Closing Reflection: Turning the Flow

The water will keep coming. There will always be applicants, always roles to fill. You cannot change the flow. But you can change the direction.

A hosepipe connected to a water cannon causes chaos. A hosepipe connected to a sprinkler feeds life. The choice is in the connection.

If we protect the people doing the hiring from fatigue, we protect the integrity of the hire itself. We preserve culture, brand, and purpose. And we give leaders the chance to lead, not just manage a never-ending list of vacancies.

Hiring is human. Let’s keep it that way.