Sixty-two percent of candidates lose interest when a hiring process drags on. If your compliance vacancies are taking months to fill, that number is probably why.
The actual numbers behind slow hiring
The UK's median time to hire currently sits at 4.9 weeks, nearly seven weeks for senior roles. That's not unusual, but it's also not harmless. A failed senior hire, one that fell through or turned out wrong after a slow, unclear process, can cost up to £240,000 once you account for wasted salary and lost productivity. Compliance and risk roles, especially specialist ones like AML or sanctions, are exactly where this bites hardest, because the candidates you actually want have other options and aren't waiting around.
Where the time actually goes
The delays are rarely about a shortage of interest. They're about vague job specs that create confusion at the screening stage, four or five interview rounds where two or three would do, gaps between stages where nobody's chasing scheduling, and offers stuck waiting on an approval that should've been sorted before the role was even posted. None of that is about being thorough. It's just friction, and candidates read it as disorganisation, not diligence.
Silence is the real problem
The single biggest driver of candidates dropping out isn't a hard interview or a tough question. It's silence. Going quiet between stages, even for a few days, is often what pushes a strong candidate to accept somewhere else. A clear rejection costs you less than a good candidate you never got back to.
The practical fix
Tighten your job spec before you post it, specificity cuts down on the wrong applicants wasting everyone's time. Cap your process at two or three stages and commit to feedback within a set window, even if that feedback is just "still deciding, here's when we'll know." Get budget and offer approval sorted before the process starts, not after you've found the person you want. And if you're routing every vacancy through a recruiter by default, ask honestly whether that layer is speeding things up or just adding a fee and a scheduling middleman between you and the candidate.
Posting directly to Direct Compliance cuts that layer out entirely, you're talking to candidates without a third party managing the handoff, which is often the fastest fix of all. List your role and see the difference in how quickly you're actually talking to people.
Read next: How to Hire for AML Analyst Vacancies (Without Losing the Best Candidates), Why Job Boards Outperform Recruitment Agencies in Today's Market and Compliance Officer Salary UK (2026): Pay by Level.