Not Hiring? You're Still Competing
- Cody Ruby
- Sep 19, 2023
- 2 min read
Updated: Jul 7

Just because you’re not actively hiring doesn’t mean the hiring game is on pause.
Your competitors are watching the market. They’re identifying who’s good, who’s happy, who’s vulnerable, and who they want when the time is right.
If you wait to build your pipeline until after you’ve been approved to hire, you’re already late.
Great engineers aren’t sitting around waiting to apply. And they’re not reading your job description the day you post it.
They’re heads-down, delivering results, solving real problems, and quietly talking to recruiters they trust.
So while you’re fine-tuning budgets, rewriting job descriptions, or debating org charts, the best candidates are getting picked off by the companies who planned ahead.
Here's what you can do now.
Align Your Team with Future Deliverables
Don’t wait for a crisis to realize where you’re understaffed. Audit your current team against the business goals you’re accountable for over the next 12 months. Where are the gaps? Where are the redundancies? This gives you a blueprint for internal upskilling and tells you where outside talent will eventually be needed.
Map Your Talent Rivals
Identify relevant competitors with the engineers, tech stack fluency, and business context you value. Build that list and track those profiles now, not later. When it’s time to hire, you’ll move fast while everyone else is starting from scratch.
Write Job Descriptions That Actually Work
Stop recycling old job descriptions that say everything and mean nothing. Interview your own team, ask better questions about the role, and rewrite the posting to reflect reality and opportunity. A clear, specific, compelling job description attracts the right candidates and repels the wrong ones.
Innovate Your Interview Process:
Revise your interview procedures to streamline efficiency, reduce latency, and enhance decision-making. Create a flowchart for each step from résumé to start date. There should be a call to action for every step in the interview journey, whether the feedback on a candidate is yes, no, even maybe. Then have all the stakeholders involved acknowledge what what each will be responsible for. Hold everyone accountable so nobody is ever 'waiting for feedback'.
Invest in Your Recruiting Infrastructure
Whether in-house or external, your recruiting function is only as good as the inputs. Equip your team with better data, pipeline visibility, and stronger partnerships. Double down on your headhunting partners who actually deliver. Give them the insight and access they need to work smarter and negotiate for better results, not just a lower commission %.
This is where we come in.
We already speak to engineers like this every day. The ones with the platform modernization expertise, the cloud experience, and the AI integration skills. These are the folks you always wish you had access to before it was too late.
We’re here to give you an edge not flood your inbox with 'maybes'. If there’s a specific skill set or profile you’d like us to keep an eye out for, let's talk. We'll keep you a step ahead.
Quiet planning now = speed and clarity later.
Comments