Hard-to-Fill Positions: Why You Can’t Find the Right Candidate

Last updated: September 24, 2026

By Samantha Litman, Executive Search, Marketing, Creative & Media, KORE1

When a hard-to-fill position has gone three months without a hire, the search is usually stuck at one specific stage, and it’s often not the stage the team is blaming. Too few candidates, the wrong candidates, finalists nobody will pick, or offers that get turned down. Each one has a different fix, so find the stage before you change anything.

I don’t have a one-line answer for this one. I wish I did.

Some version of the question lands on my desk every week, usually right around month three and usually from somebody who sounds tired. Why is this role still open? What are we doing wrong? Is it us, or is it the market? And my honest first answer is that I don’t know yet. I can’t. Not until I know where the search is getting stuck.

I know that sounds like a dodge. Stick with me.

A search is a chain. The right people have to find out the role exists, some of them have to raise their hands, somebody has to screen them, the team has to interview them, somebody has to decide, and then a real person has to say yes to a real offer. When a search runs long, one link in that chain is usually doing most of the damage, and if you fix the wrong one you can burn another three months polishing a job description that was never the problem.

After this many years on agency, brand, and entertainment searches, I’ve learned to ask where before I ask why. That’s how I work with clients on the marketing and creative recruiting team at KORE1, and it’s what the rest of this post walks through.

What Makes a Position Hard to Fill?

A hard-to-fill position is a role that stays open well past the normal time to hire for its level and market, usually because too few qualified people can be reached, the ones who can be reached don’t want it, or the hiring team can’t agree on who qualifies. Some roles are genuinely scarce. Many more only look that way from inside the search.

You’re not imagining the problem, by the way. Small business owners feel it hardest. Thirty-five percent of them had openings they couldn’t fill in August 2026, per the National Federation of Independent Business monthly jobs report, and of the owners hiring or trying to hire, 82% said they were getting few qualified applicants or none at all.

That’s a lot of frustration.

The number I find more useful comes from the state of Oregon, which asks employers every year what’s hard to fill and why. In the Oregon Employment Department’s 2025 vacancy survey, employers called 54% of their openings difficult to fill. Lack of qualified candidates topped the list, named as the main reason on about a third of those openings. No applicants at all? A distant second. Low wages were the main reason for only about one in twenty.

Read that again. Most of the time, people showed up.

They just didn’t match the picture. And “qualified” is a judgment somebody makes, which means it can be examined. Oregon’s numbers even hint at one place to look, since employers struggled with 75% of openings that asked for more than five years of experience, against about 61% of those asking for one to five. The same report notes roughly two unemployed Oregonians for every opening. Oregon isn’t my market, and the jobs at the top of its list are truck drivers, nurses, and cooks, not art directors. The shape still matches what I see in marketing and creative searches almost exactly.

Which Stage Is Holding Things Up?

Here’s the map I use. Find the row that sounds most like your last three months. Be honest.

Most teams are sure they’re in row two. A lot of the time they’re in row four. Nobody likes admitting to row four.

An Empty Pipeline

If the pipeline is thin, I start with the question I ask more than any other at this stage. Is the person we’re looking for actually out there?

There’s a quick way to find out. It takes two minutes. Ask the hiring manager to name five people, anywhere, who could walk in and do this job tomorrow. Former colleagues. Someone at a competitor. The person who gave that great talk at the conference last spring. Real names, not types.

Five names means the people exist, and you have a reach problem. Good news, actually. Two names, and then a long pause? You may be describing a role that’s really two jobs glued together, or one that barely exists yet anywhere in the market. A single posting for a media planner and buyer is the classic example.

Reach problems are the most fixable kind. The best marketing and creative people are mostly employed, busy, and not scrolling job boards on a Tuesday night, so a posting mostly reaches the people who are already looking. Everyone else takes a phone call, a warm introduction, or a recruiter who already knows them. I’m aware I’m the one who makes those calls, so weigh that however you like. It’s also just how happily employed people behave. If you do bring a recruiter in, ask how they vet candidates before you ever see a resume.

Check the words at the top, too. If the title doesn’t match what good people type into a search box, they’ll never see the posting at all. I wrote about what a marketing job title tells candidates for exactly that reason. And sometimes the people are out there and simply aren’t moving right now. That changes how long this will take. It doesn’t change whether the search is worth running.

Plenty of Applicants, None of Them Right

This is the one everybody thinks they have. Sometimes they’re right! If you keep passing on people who can clearly do the work, and the reason is always a line on the list rather than anything they said or showed you, the list is the problem, and I’ve written a whole piece on requirements that are too specific, so this part stays short. Quick version of the check. Pull the last ten people you turned down and write the single reason next to each name. Same line, over and over? You’ve found it. It’s also why I call a job description the blueprint and not the house.

Good First Interviews, Then Silence

This one stings. You liked them. They seemed to like you. Then the follow-up email goes unanswered, or a polite note arrives saying they’ve decided to stay put.

Ask them why. I mean it.

Most hiring teams never ask. The few who do tend to ask from a company email address, which gets them the polite version. Candidates will tell me things they would never say to the company. I’m not going to be their boss. And they know I’ll call again next year with something else, so there’s no reason to be diplomatic with me. I’ve heard every version. Nobody in the second interview had looked at their portfolio. The hiring manager took a call halfway through. The job described in round one wasn’t the job described in round two. The pay range came up in the last five minutes, and it was lower than anyone had said.

Your applicant tracking system will never capture any of that. All of it is fixable. If the problem is simply that the process drags, there’s a good case for a shorter interview process, and it’s worth making before the next strong person walks away.

Finalists, and Nobody Will Say Yes

I see this stage a lot around month three. From the inside, it’s the hardest to spot, because it feels like being careful. It’s sneaky.

It usually goes something like this. You’ve met two or three people who could clearly do the job. Everyone liked someone. Nobody loved anyone. So somebody says, “Let’s see a few more, just to be sure,” and the search rolls quietly into another month.

What’s usually happening is that each finalist is being measured against someone who doesn’t exist. The perfect candidate. The one everybody built in their heads during the first week, who has every skill on the list, fits the culture exactly, and costs what the budget says. Real people lose to that person. Every single time.

There’s research on this that I really love. Iris Bohnet, Alexandra van Geen, and Max Bazerman ran experiments, published in Management Science in 2016, comparing what happens when people evaluate candidates one at a time versus side by side. Evaluated one at a time, people leaned on stereotypes and sometimes even picked the weaker performer. Evaluated together, they chose on performance, and the gender gap in their choices disappeared. Harvard Kennedy School’s Gender Action Portal has a plain-language summary of the joint versus separate evaluation study if you want the detail.

The study was about bias. I think the lesson reaches further than that. One at a time, you’re holding each person up against your imagination. Two real people, side by side? Now you’re comparing them to each other, and that’s a question a team can actually answer in an afternoon.

So that’s what I ask teams to do. Take your two strongest finalists and put them side by side against the same three questions, the three things this person absolutely has to get done in their first year. Not the whole list. Three. Then decide.

Sometimes the answer is still neither, and that’s fine. At least now you know exactly what was missing, and you can go find someone stronger on that one thing. Other times the side-by-side shows you something nobody expected, because the finalist who looked like a stretch turns out to be stronger on the thing that matters most. Sometimes we get so stuck on exactly what we think we need that we don’t see what could work even better. That’s the moment I live for in this job.

There’s a quieter version of this stage, too. Four interviewers, four different pictures of the job. The brand director wants a big-idea person, the CMO wants someone who can run a budget, and the team just wants someone who’ll be good to work with. Every finalist fails somebody’s test. If that sounds familiar, ask each interviewer separately to write down the one thing that would make them say no. If the four answers barely overlap, the search was never going to end on its own.

Offers That Keep Getting Turned Down

If you’re getting all the way to an offer and hearing no, the search is working. The close isn’t.

Usually it comes down to money, title, speed, or a counteroffer, and the counteroffer is the one people forget, because the candidate’s current boss suddenly discovers money and a promotion that somehow didn’t exist six months ago. Low pay barely registered as a main reason in that Oregon survey, which surprised me a little, but a declined offer is a different moment. That’s when pay gets real. Not sure your number holds up? A few minutes with KORE1’s salary benchmark assistant makes a fast gut check, and it’s a lot cheaper than a third decline.

Speed matters. A lot. The people worth hiring rarely have just one conversation going, and if two weeks pass between the final interview and the offer, somebody else may simply have gotten there first. Most of the fixes for shortening time to hire come down to removing the waits between steps.

Three Months In, What Could You Gain?

This is my favorite part of a stalled search, honestly. Once you know where it’s stuck, you get to ask a better question than “what could we give up?” What could this search gain if you looked at it a little differently? Here are a few of the moves I suggest most often.

• Hire the person one level down who’s already doing the job without the title. Almost every agency has a senior art director quietly running work an associate creative director would normally run. Some are ready. Hungry, too, in a way the person who’s done the job three times usually isn’t anymore.
• Split it. If the role is really two jobs, hire one person full time for the half that matters most and bring in a contract copywriter, producer, or analyst for the other half.
• Does this person truly need to sit in one city’s office every single day? Asking costs nothing.
• Test the gray areas. When the team can’t agree whether a requirement matters, contract-to-hire lets the work answer the question instead of the conference room.
• Someone from a neighboring industry. It won’t fit every role. It works more often than people expect.

None of this is settling. Sometimes the rethought version of the role is simply a better job, and a better job attracts better people.

When a Role Truly Is Rare

Sometimes you do everything right and it’s still slow. Some people really are rare, like a head of production who has run budgets on both live-action shoots and animation, a brand partnerships lead with real relationships on the studio side and the sponsor side, or a media director who has run linear and programmatic at scale and can explain both to a CFO without anybody’s eyes glazing over.

When the person truly is scarce, you have three honest options. Pay more than you planned. Wait longer than you’d like. Or go find them, which means a targeted search that goes out to people instead of waiting for people to come in. For senior marketing and creative roles, that’s usually a direct hire search run by a recruiter who already knows who’s out there.

I do exactly that for a living, so you know where I’m coming from. Here’s why I think the patience pays off anyway. KORE1 tracks whether its placements work out, and its 12-month retention rate is 92%, which is the standard I hold my own searches to. A search that takes one more month and lands someone who stays is a completely different thing from a quick hire you’re replacing next spring.

The Meeting I’d Hold This Week

If you’re at month three right now, here’s where I’d start. Pull five numbers from the search so far, meaning how many people applied, how many you screened, how many you interviewed, how many reached the final round, and how many got offers, and look for the place where the count falls off a cliff, because that drop is where your search is stuck. Then call two people who dropped out. Then get everyone who’s interviewing into one room and agree on what the first year has to deliver. If the room can’t agree, pause the search until it can.

It’s an hour. It can save you the next three months.

Month Three, Asked and Answered

So What Actually Makes a Job Hard to Fill?

A job becomes hard to fill when the right people are rare, when they aren’t willing to move right now, or when the hiring team can’t agree on who qualifies. The first is real scarcity. The other two are more common than anyone likes to admit, and both are fixable.

Should We Repost the Job or Start the Search Over?

Repost only if something real has changed, like the title, the level, the pay, or the must-haves. The same posting with a fresh date mostly reaches the same people who passed the first time. Change something first.

Is It Worth Interviewing a Few More People Just in Case?

It’s worth seeing more candidates only if you can name exactly what the next person needs to have that your current finalists are missing.

If you can’t name it, “a few more” tends to turn into another month, and your finalists won’t wait around for it. Strong people are usually talking to more than one company at once.

Is It Time to Bring a Recruiter Into a Stalled Search?

Hand it off when the problem is reach, meaning the people you want exist but aren’t applying, or when the role is senior enough that a wrong hire would be expensive to undo.

Here’s the part I’d rather tell you up front. A recruiter won’t fix a team that can’t decide. If your search is stuck at the decision stage, I can bring you more finalists, and you’ll be exactly where you are now with a longer list. So if it’s the list or the decision, sort that out first, with or without me. Then, if it’s reach, call someone who spends every day talking to the people you’re trying to find. That part really is what we’re for.

What Jobs Are the Hardest to Fill Right Now?

Economy-wide, the hardest openings to fill tend to be hands-on roles, and in Oregon’s 2025 employer survey, truck drivers, restaurant cooks, registered nurses, and personal care aides were among the toughest.

In my corner of marketing and creative, the searches that run longest are usually the hybrids, roles asking one person to bring two careers’ worth of experience.

Which Row Is Yours?

So, three months in. Which row of that table is yours?

If you can point to it, you’re most of the way there. If you honestly can’t tell, that’s my favorite kind of conversation to have. Tell me about the role, the people you’ve met, and the ones who got away, and we’ll find the stage together. Let’s talk. If you’d rather start with a quick note, I’m on LinkedIn too.