You will lose most of the candidates who are in high demand during the late stages of your recruitment process – when currently employed top performers decide to enter the job market, they are likely to be quickly inundated with recruiting requests and offers, which means that often they will only be on the job market for a matter of days. So if you/your firm drag out the hiring process over time, the most sought-after prospects (i.e. in-high-demand prospects) will have many opportunities to make quick offer acceptance decisions while you are still only midway through your hiring process. Your top candidates assuredly will receive alternative offers and will be forced to make a decision as to whether to accept “a current offer” that will soon expire, rather than to wait for “a possible future offer” from your firm. So even if you capture them as an applicant, the odds of them still being available when you reach the late stages of an extended recruiting process is almost zero (with the one exception if you happen to have a powerhouse employment brand like Google). My research indicates that the top 10 percent of candidates are often gone from the marketplace within 10 days. I also estimate the recruiting loss from missing a single game-changer, purple squirrel, or innovator recruit to be over $1 million each. The lesson to be learned is: that speed of hire is most important when you are competing against other firms for currently employed “in-high-demand” top talent. You simply must hire fast, because if you don’t, the competition will take this top talent off the market before you have the time to make a hiring decision. For example if Tiger Woods decided to leave his golf team, he would be in such demand that he might be in and then out of the job market in as little as a few hours, so a 30-day hiring process would have no chance of success.