Last updated: October 23, 2026
By Devin Hornick, Co-Founder and Partner, KORE1
Engineering reqs usually sit open because the company hasn’t finished deciding, not because candidates are missing: scope keeps changing, approvals stall, and the interview loop has no clear owner. While that decision gets made, a contractor can keep the work moving. KORE1 contractors start a median of 3 days after an accepted offer (n=1,997, 2019 to 2026).
Why do job postings stay open so long? From the outside it looks like a market problem. From inside the engineering orgs I talk to every week, the honest answer is usually a meeting that hasn’t happened yet.
I’ve been telling clients the same thing all fall. Long-open engineering reqs are a decision shortage, not a talent shortage.
Full disclosure, we sell contract staffing with KORE1, and a stuck req is exactly when people call us. So weigh my opinion with that in mind. A contractor isn’t always the right move, and I’ll point out where it isn’t.
Is It a Talent Shortage or a Decision Shortage?
Start with the national picture. In August 2026 U.S. employers had 7.1 million open jobs and made 5.2 million hires, according to the BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Openings outrunning hires proves nothing by itself. Some of those are live searches. Some are evergreen postings nobody intends to fill this month. And some are reqs that got approved in a planning meeting and then never actually got decided.
That third group is the one worth your attention.
Here’s what it looks like, described loosely because it’s a composite of several searches we worked this year. A platform team in Orange County opens a senior backend req in March, Go and PostgreSQL with some Kubernetes on the side. We send four people in the first ten days and two reach a final round. Then the director wants the hire to own the data pipeline too, the VP wants an architect who’s out for two weeks to weigh in, and finance asks whether the headcount should slide to Q3. By June the req still says “open.” Nobody rejected a candidate for being unqualified. The candidates took other offers.
Supply was never the problem.
KORE1’s average time-to-hire for IT roles is 17 days. The searches that drag on for months with us are rarely short on resumes. They’re short on a yes. If you want the benchmark side of this, we cover how long tech roles take to fill in 2026 and the narrower software engineer time-to-fill benchmarks separately. This piece is about why.
Where Do Engineering Reqs Actually Stall?
Five stall points account for nearly every stuck req I’ve been asked to look at in 2026, and two or three usually travel together.
Scope That Won’t Sit Still
Week one, the req reads “senior backend engineer, Go, PostgreSQL, AWS.” By week three it has picked up Terraform, on-call for the Kubernetes cluster, mentoring two juniors, and ownership of a Snowflake pipeline nobody else wanted, all at the same $175K band. I sat in on one of those Tuesday meetings once (by phone, half listening, I’ll admit) and every single addition sounded sensible out loud. Stack them up, though, and you’ve described somebody who doesn’t exist at that level. The six people who fit version one? Wrong for version three. Interviewers sense it before they can say why, so “not quite” starts creeping into the Greenhouse or Lever scorecards about people they’d have happily hired in April.
Approval Chains That Keep Growing
Back in 2021, most engineering offers I saw at 300-person companies needed two signatures, the hiring manager’s and finance’s. Now I regularly see four: engineering, finance, HR, and an AI steering group that wants to know whether Copilot or an agent could cover the role first. A req waits for the slowest calendar in that chain, and if one approver is at a conference for nine days, so is your offer. A one-page packet is the fastest fix we know for getting a contract req through procurement without three rounds of questions.
Interview Loops With No Owner
Five rounds. Four interviewers.
Recruiter screen, a 90-minute take-home, a system design round, a pairing session, and a “values” chat with the VP. Feedback trickles in over eight business days because nobody owns the debrief, the strongest finalist accepts the offer that arrived on day five, and the team concludes the market is thin. It wasn’t thin. It was faster than you.
Comp Set for a Different Req
The band came from somewhere. Last year’s number, usually, or a salary site quoting base pay for a role one level down, pulled by someone who has since left. Then two finalists turn the offer down in the same month and everybody blames candidates, when what’s really sitting there is a budget call nobody made. Thirty minutes with finance would settle it. Good luck getting the thirty minutes. Our salary benchmark assistant is a decent place to sanity-check the band before you ask for it.
Waiting to See If AI Covers It
This one is new, and it’s everywhere in 2026. A team holds the req while someone decides whether an AI tool might absorb the work. Fair question to ask. The evidence so far isn’t encouraging for the people waiting, though. A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper that surveyed nearly 9,000 CFOs, CEOs, and senior executives across seven countries found AI has had essentially no net effect on firm employment over the last three years. The work you opened the req for is still sitting there. It just isn’t getting done.
How Do You Tell Which One Is Slowing Your Req?
Ask these out loud at the next staff meeting, and write down who answers.
- Has the job description changed since the req was approved? If someone has to go check, it has.
- Who can approve an offer without asking anyone? You want one name. Two names, or a pause, means you’ve found an approval problem.
- Count the days between your last final interview and the decision, from the calendar and not from memory.
- Did the last two finalists decline on money? Then it’s comp, and more sourcing won’t touch it.
- Is anyone holding this work for an AI pilot? Ask finance too. They often know before engineering does.
If none of those land, you may have a genuine supply problem. They exist. Cleared engineers for a narrow defense program, senior firmware people who know one specific RTOS, a few kinds of ML infrastructure work. Real shortages, all of them, and also not what most stuck reqs turn out to be.
Here’s how the stall points map to a fix, and to what a contractor can and can’t do while you make it.
| Stall point | What you’ll notice | The fix | Contract bridge option |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scope churn | Interviewers say “not quite” about people who matched the original req | Freeze the must-haves for 30 days and park the extras in a second req | A contractor covers the original scope while the full role gets redefined |
| Approval chain | An offer sits waiting on someone outside the team | Name one approver for the offer and make everyone else an adviser | A three-month contract is a smaller, bounded commitment to approve through your normal supplier process |
| Interview loop with no owner | Feedback takes over a week and finalists accept elsewhere | One owner, three rounds at most, a decision within 48 hours of the final | Contract-to-hire puts the person on real work, so the question becomes whether they can do it |
| Comp mismatch | Finalists decline at the offer stage | Re-benchmark the band against current market data | An hourly bill rate shows you the market price before you commit to a salary |
| Waiting on AI | The req is “on hold pending the pilot” | Put a date on the pilot decision | A contractor carries the work, and the engagement simply ends if the tool covers it later |
What Does the Open Seat Cost While You Decide?
Two different costs, and people blur them together. One is the work that isn’t happening. The other is what it costs to cover that work in the meantime.
The second one has a number. For a mid-level software engineer, the KORE1 Contract Rate Index 2026-Q4 puts the national bill rate between $96 and $122 an hour, with a median of $108 (cell software-engineer | mid | united-states-national). A quarter at 40 hours a week is about 520 hours, so a bridge contractor at the median runs about $56,100 for three months, and roughly $49,900 to $63,400 across the range. That cell is modeled from May 2025 wages in the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, a 24% employer burden, and the bill bands on our own placements. Your metro will move it, sometimes a lot. Run your own role and city through the contract staffing cost calculator, and if finance wants to know where the figures come from, send them our note on how the rate index is built.
And the first cost? I can’t price a slipped quarter of roadmap for you. You can, roughly, and it’s usually the figure that ends the debate.
How Does a Contractor Bridge the Gap Without Locking In the Decision?
A good bridge doesn’t decide anything for you. That’s the whole point of it.
Speed comes first. KORE1 contractors start a median of 3 days after an accepted offer, 86% start within a week, and 37% start the same day (n=1,997). The work restarts while the org chart conversation keeps going. We broke down how fast a contractor can start, day by day, in a separate post.
Length is the second thing, and it’s flexible in both directions. Our median contract assignment runs 116 days (n=1,887), about one quarter, which is the horizon most bridge engagements get planned on. Billing is hourly, so if the decision lands in six weeks, the engagement can end in six weeks.
Third, the person can stay. Set the role up as contract-to-hire and the contractor can convert to your payroll at no fee from KORE1 after 1,040 hours. Of our contract-to-hire placements, 37.5% converted to direct hire (207 of 552). Some teams discover the contractor was the hire all along, and the open req quietly closes itself. Our contract-to-hire guide walks through how that conversion works.
All of those figures come from KORE1’s job-activity report, 2019 to 2026, and 79% of those placements were in California. Weight them accordingly if you hire mostly in Texas or the Midwest.
Finance teams sometimes like the bridge for a reason that has nothing to do with speed. On our October 16 content call I put it this way: “The contract allows that company to write it off as a CapEx, if they’re working on a development project… you can get them quick… flexible… to scale up, to scale down as needed.” Check the CapEx part with your controller before you count on it, because capitalization depends on the project and your accounting policy, not on us.
Where doesn’t it work? A role that exists mainly to make architectural calls. A contractor can hold the line on delivery but can’t make the decisions the team is avoiding, and shouldn’t be asked to. If what you actually need is more hands on a defined roadmap, read our take on scaling an engineering team with contractors before you add three at once, or look at how we handle software engineer staffing for longer builds.
Keep the work moving while you decide. Tell us the role, level, metro, start date, and how long you need cover, and we’ll come back with a bill rate quote for a bridge contractor. Get a bridge contractor quote.
Want the numbers first? The 2026 Contract Rate Card lists bill rates by role, level, and metro.
Who Should Own the Hiring Decision?
One person. Not a committee with a chair.
That sounds obvious, and it has gotten harder. On the same October call I said, “With AI, I’m seeing that so many more managers are involved… HR kind of ran things.” Hiring used to have a referee. Now the budget owner, the engineering lead, the AI working group, and a finance partner all have a hand on the req, and HR mostly sits on the calls. Nobody is doing anything wrong. There’s just no one whose job it is to say yes.
The fix is boring and it works. The hiring manager owns the yes or no on a candidate. Finance owns the budget number, once, before the search starts. Everyone else advises, in writing, by a date. We wrote up a full decision ownership diagram for engineering teams, and hiring is the first place I’d apply it.
What VPs of Engineering Ask Me About Stuck Reqs
Why are our engineering reqs open for months when there are plenty of candidates?
Because the bottleneck is usually inside the company, not in the candidate pool.
Scope changes, an extra approver, or an interview loop with no single owner each add weeks, and good candidates accept other offers while you wait. Fix the decision and the same pool usually produces a hire.
Is there a quick way to find out which decision is holding things up?
Five questions, about ten minutes.
Ask whether the job description has changed since approval, who can approve an offer alone, how many days passed between the last final interview and a decision, why recent finalists declined, and whether anyone is waiting on an AI pilot. The first awkward pause in the room is usually your answer.
When does it actually make sense to bridge an open req with a contractor?
When the work can’t wait and the decision can’t be rushed.
If a release, a migration, or an audit deadline is already on the calendar, a mid-level software engineer at a national median of $108 an hour keeps it moving for about $56,100 a quarter. If the role is mostly about making architectural calls, fix the decision instead.
Realistically, how long should an engineering role take to fill?
17 days is KORE1’s average time-to-hire for IT roles.
Senior and specialized searches run longer, and your internal timeline depends mostly on how quickly you decide once finalists are in front of you.
Doesn’t a contractor just push the real hire further out?
Not if you set it up as contract-to-hire.
The contractor does the work while you decide, and if they’re the right person they can convert to your payroll at no fee after 1,040 hours. Across KORE1 contract-to-hire placements, 37.5% converted to direct hire (207 of 552), and a few teams realize partway through that the contractor was the hire they’d been searching for.
Make the Call, or Cover the Gap
Every stalled engineering req I’ve looked at in 2026 had the same fix sitting on the table. Someone with authority picks one version of the role, signs the offer, and moves on. If getting there is going to take until Q1, the release on your roadmap doesn’t have to wait until Q1 too, because a contractor can be on it 3 days after an accepted offer. Talk to a recruiter about a bridge contractor, or price a three-month engagement yourself first.
