Your interview loop is the bottleneck. Not your sourcing.
Founders blame the recruiter, the brand, the comp band. The constraint is almost always decision speed inside the loop.
Talk to a hiring CEO long enough and you'll hear the same theory: we just need a better recruiter, sourcer, employer brand. Sometimes that's true. Most of the time it isn't.
The actual constraint is internal. A candidate moves through four rounds with a 10-day average gap between rounds. The strongest candidates have three offers in their inbox and you've used 40 days of clock to render an opinion. By the time the offer goes out, the candidate is already verbally committed elsewhere.
Speed isn't a hiring strategy. It's a hiring requirement. If your loop runs slower than your competitors', you don't see what's actually on the market.
The fix is not "move faster"
Telling a busy executive to move faster on interviews is meaningless advice. They're already drowning. The fix is structural.
Standardize the scorecard before the loop starts. Pre-book all four interview slots the day the candidate accepts the first call. Run a 30-minute calibration meeting the same week, not when we can find a time. Decide same-day or write the reason it took longer.
The numbers that matter
A healthy senior loop in a 50-200 person company: candidate signs through to verbal in 14 days, signed offer in 21. If your loop runs longer than 30 days end-to-end, you are losing your top three candidates of every five to the speed gap alone.
Fix the loop and the sourcing problem often disappears. It was a downstream symptom.