From 90 Days to a Few Weeks: How Fast-Moving CTOs Hire

Your VP of Engineering says it will take about 90 days to hire a mid-level full-stack developer. You found a promising candidate in week one. The interview loop takes six weeks. Background checks and paperwork take four more.

By the time they start, a quarter is gone and your roadmap is behind.

Some of that is process, and some of it is structure. US hiring was built for office-based roles in a scarce local market, and it still runs that way even when the job is remote.

Some CTOs we talk to now get hires started in a few weeks instead. They’re not cutting corners. They changed who does the filtering.

What a slow search costs

Every week an open role stays open is a week of roadmap you don’t ship. Review queues back up, and the remaining developers cover the gap. We don’t have a reliable figure for the average time to hire, and it varies a lot by role and seniority, so use your own last three hires as the baseline.

Slow searches also cost you candidates. Strong developers don’t sit on the market for long, and a six-week loop loses people to faster offers.

The shortcut most teams reach for is to hire faster by lowering the bar. That tends to backfire, because a bad hire costs you months of productivity and a second search. Published estimates of replacement cost vary widely, so we won’t quote one here. Speed is fine. Speed from skipping vetting is the problem.

What faster teams do differently

They keep the vetting and move it upstream. Instead of a wide funnel where your team interviews dozens of candidates, they work with a partner who has already screened for technical skills, communication, and fit.

Your team then meets a short list, not a pile. Think a 45-minute technical interview, a conversation or two with the team, and a culture check. That is often about a week.

The slowest part of most cross-border hires is paperwork: payroll, contracts, and tax setup. A partner who does this routinely can shorten it. Hiring a Canadian developer for a US company usually runs through an employer of record or a contractor arrangement. See our EOR vs contractor vs subsidiary guide for the tradeoffs.

In our experience that puts start dates at roughly two to four weeks from first conversation. It depends on the candidate’s notice period, which you can’t compress.

Why Canada

Time zone overlap does most of the work. A developer in Canada works your hours, so standups, production incidents, and code review happen live instead of overnight. Overlap with offshore teams is often a few hours at best, and code review that takes 30 minutes in one time zone can take a day when the gap is nearly a full workday.

Cultural and communication norms are closer too. That’s friction you don’t have to manage, though it doesn’t remove the need for good onboarding.

Retention is the other reason. DecodeTalent’s clients see 95% retention, and in our experience Canadian developers in US roles tend to stay. A faster start only pays off if the person is still there in two years.

Total cost of employment is meaningfully lower than local US hiring, though higher than offshore. We won’t put a number on it here. Ask for current ranges on a call.

Fit, not just speed

The usual tradeoff is speed against fit. Partners who invest in fit can move quickly because the filtering is already done. We also keep working with developers after placement, including coaching on AI-assisted development, architecture, and async work.

That alignment matters. A placement firm paid on day one has little reason to care what happens in month three. We back ours with a 90-day replacement guarantee, so a bad fit costs us too.

Where this doesn’t work: very niche stacks with a tiny talent pool, roles that need an on-site presence, and teams without the onboarding capacity to absorb someone new, however fast they arrive.

Next step

Pull the time-to-start for your last three engineering hires and see which step took longest. If it was sourcing or paperwork, that’s where a partner helps. If it was your own interview loop, that’s yours to fix.

If you want to talk through your situation, book a discovery call.