Field notes
Where candidates actually stall in a Hong Kong hiring funnel
Most funnel charts flatten the middle. Applications and offers look dramatic; the quiet damage sits in the handoffs — recruiter screen to hiring-manager review, first interview to second, verbal yes to signed offer.
In Hong Kong hiring cycles we see three stall patterns repeat:
- Manager review queues that grow when calendars collide with quarter-end travel.
- Assessment wait times that are not labelled as a stage, so they vanish from the chart.
- Offer approvals that sit with finance while the candidate keeps talking to other employers.
Before you redraw a recruitment funnel dashboard, write the stage list with the people who live those handoffs. If a step has no named owner, it will not appear as a stall — it will look like “normal delay.”
A useful first chart is not conversion overall. It is median days in stage for the last thirty closed roles, split by role family. That view usually points to the room that needs a process change more clearly than a single funnel percentage.