There’s a sentence you’ve probably heard so often you no longer question it: “That’s just how hiring works.”
The process takes longer than promised. The update doesn’t come. Another interview gets added. The role changes. The decision moves. And through all of it, you’re expected to stay interested, available, responsive, and gracious.
We call that normal. But normal isn’t the same as acceptable. Often it just means the people with less power have learned to absorb the cost.
I’ve spent my career in recruiting, most of it in go-to-market hiring. I know hiring is a human process with several decision-makers, shifting priorities, and imperfect information. I also know the difference between real complexity and a commitment made carelessly.
I’ve now seen it from both sides of the table. The contrast is hard to ignore.
Two Standards
Picture an employee who commits to a deadline tied to a key metric, then misses it because of a conflict everyone knew about in advance. Would the company shrug and say, “That’s just how work goes”?
Probably not. There would be questions. Why was the commitment made? Why wasn’t the risk raised earlier? Why did the update arrive after the deadline instead of before it?
Those are fair questions. Accountability is part of professional work.
When a company misses a commitment to a candidate, the standard changes. A delay becomes “process friction.” A preventable planning failure becomes “scheduling complexity.” Silence becomes an unfortunate but ordinary part of hiring.
The behavior is the same. The judgment depends on who set the terms.
The Imbalance Is Built In
You’re expected to be precise. Show up on time. Prepare thoroughly. Answer quickly. Explain every job change. Clear your calendar. Show enthusiasm at every stage. Follow up without seeming impatient. Wait without seeming disengaged.
The company keeps a different set of options. Timelines can stay vague. Interviews can multiply. Communication can pause. Decisions can slide with little acknowledgment of what the delay costs the person waiting.
That cost is real, even when the company can’t see it. You might be holding off on another offer, rearranging your current job, putting a financial decision on hold, or keeping your hopes invested in a process that could end without a word of feedback.
None of this is an accident. It’s what happens when one side has more options, more information, and more authority, and the other side carries most of the uncertainty.
“We Have Forty Candidates in Process”
Here’s the pushback I hear from hiring teams, and it deserves an answer. They’re juggling dozens of candidates and several open roles. They can’t give everyone a personal update every week.
That’s true. It’s also not what anyone is asking for.
No one needs a weekly call. They need the date they were given to mean something. A responsible team can send one line: “We’re still finishing interviews, so we won’t have a decision by Friday. Expect an update by the 20th.” Or: “A key decision-maker is out, and we expect to resume next week.” Or simply: “Our timeline changed, and we wanted you to hear it before the date we gave you.”
That isn’t radical transparency. It’s ordinary professional communication, and it takes less time than the follow-up emails it prevents.
Recruiters know which delays are unavoidable. We also know which come from poor planning, indecision, or a culture that doesn’t count the candidate’s time as an operating cost. If we call every one of them “the reality of hiring,” we protect the very reality we should be changing.
What You Can Do in the Meantime
You can’t fix a company’s process from the outside. You can stop letting it set all the terms.
Ask for the date, and ask what happens if it moves. “When should I expect to hear back, and how will you let me know if that changes?” is a professional question. A good team will answer it.
Set your own deadline. If you have other conversations in motion, say so plainly. “I’m in late stages elsewhere and would like to know where things stand by the 15th” is not a threat. It’s information they need.
Treat silence as data. How a company treats you while it’s still trying to win you over is the best preview you’ll get of how it treats people once they’ve said yes. A missed date isn’t a reason to beat yourself up. It might be a reason to reweigh the offer.
Keep your energy spread out. Until there’s a written offer, there’s no offer. Keep other doors open and don’t pause your search for anyone’s timeline but your own.
None of that requires you to be difficult. It only requires you to stop being the only one in the process who’s held to a schedule.
Resignation Isn’t Professionalism
What troubles me most is how fully we’ve normalized all this.
Candidates warn each other not to expect updates. They learn that a stated timeline is only a suggestion. They’re told not to take silence personally, not to push, not to risk sounding difficult. The safest response to a broken process often turns out to be more politeness.
For any one candidate, that may be the smart move. It’s also how an unfair system keeps itself running.
So the real question is a simple one. Why have we accepted a version of professionalism in which accountability flows toward power, and almost never away from it?
The answer isn’t that people are comfortable with it. Most have learned that challenging it carries a cost.
But normal isn’t inevitable. Hiring processes are built by people. The expectations inside them are reinforced by people. They can be changed by people, too.
It starts with no longer hiding behind “that’s just how hiring works.”
How hiring works is a choice. The question is who gets to make it, and who has to live with it.
Explore More from Moonshot
If you lead hiring and want a process that respects candidates’ time, explore Moonshot’s recruiting and career services or read Time-to-Human on why human attention is now the scarce resource in hiring.