The market has shifted towards the people you want to hire. Rise Technical's 2025/26 Insights Report, surveying over 500 employers and 1,000 candidates found that 79% of UK technical professionals plan to change employers in 2026. That means most of the engineers you interview are open to moving, but they also have options and little patience for a slow, confusing process.
Demand for skills makes this sharper. The Institution of Engineering and Technology reported in 2025 that 76% of engineering employers struggle to recruit for key roles, with technical and specialist sustainability skills topping the list. When good software engineers are this hard to find, every extra interview stage is a chance for a strong applicant to accept an offer somewhere else.
Most interview processes grow by accident. A team adds a stage after one bad hire, keeps it forever, and nobody asks whether it still earns its place. Over time you end up with a phone screen, a take-home task, a live coding round, a system design round and a panel, each run by different people testing overlapping things.
The dynamics work against you here. With 79% of UK technical professionals planning to move in 2026, according to Rise Technical's 2025/26 Insights Report, the engineers worth hiring are usually interviewing in two or three places at once. A five-stage process spread over three weeks loses to a tighter one almost every time, not because your stages are bad, but because someone else closed first.
Start by mapping every stage you run, who owns it, what it actually tests and how long it adds to the clock. Then score each stage against three questions: does it predict on-the-job performance, does it duplicate another stage, and does it respect the applicant's time? Any stage that fails two of the three is a candidate for cutting.
The goal isn't the shortest process. It's the leanest one that still gives you confidence. In a market where 76% of engineering employers struggle to recruit for key roles, per the Institution of Engineering and Technology's 2025 figures, speed and signal matter more than volume of hoops.
Benchmarking your stages only pays off if you can reach the right engineers before your process even starts. Our recruitment agent manages recruitment end to end for 8% on a successful hire, with no monthly fee and no upfront cost, through Reed.ai. If you want a tighter, faster engineering hire, tell us what good looks like and we'll bring you the shortlist.
