Stuck Roles: Why Tech Jobs Stay Open, and What Companies Can Do About It
A stuck role is not only an HR problem. It is a business signal.
Somewhere in Lisbon there is a job ad that went online in June and is still online today. Ninety days. The budget was approved, the hiring manager still wants the person, and the ad has not changed a word since the day it was published.
The ad is not the interesting part. What is interesting is what has been happening inside that team for three months while the seat stayed empty.
I spend most of my week talking to companies in exactly that position. They rarely describe it as a crisis. They describe it as “we are still looking.” But the cost has already landed; it is just not written down anywhere, and nobody has given the situation a name.
So here is the name I use for it: a stuck role.
What a stuck role is
A stuck role is a position that is still unfilled sixty days after the ad went live.
Sixty days is not an arbitrary line. A well defined ad for a common technical profile usually converts within a few weeks. Applications arrive, a shortlist forms, the process moves. When the same ad is still online after two months, something has broken upstream: either suitable people are not applying, or they are applying and turning the offer down. Past ninety days, in my experience, the ad itself is more often the problem than the market is.
What makes this worth writing about is that all of it is visible from the outside. A job ad is a public document with a publication date attached. Anyone can see what a company is looking for and, with a little attention, how long it has been looking. A role that stays open for a full quarter is a company saying in public, for free, that it needs a person and cannot find one.
A stuck role is not only an HR problem. It is a business signal, and it says something about delivery capacity, about how well a company can describe its own work, and about what it is prepared to pay for scarce skills.
Why roles get stuck
In my experience there are four reasons, and three of them have nothing to do with the market.
1. The ad asks for someone who barely exists
One ad I read recently asked for eight years of experience, five specific technologies, fluent English, and offered a salary aligned with a mid level engineer. Perhaps a few dozen people in the country match that description. Most of them are employed, well paid, and not reading job ads. The ad was not wrong about what the team needed. It was wrong about what the team could have at that price.
2. The ad describes two jobs in one
A logistics company spent four months looking for someone who would be half backend developer, half project manager. Developers read it and saw a role that would pull them away from code. Project managers read it and saw a technical bar they could not clear. The ad collected a healthy number of views and almost no qualified applications. It was never one role. It was two, and once the company split it, both were filled.
3. The ad is vague or unattractive
Another ad listed eleven requirements and said nothing at all about the product, the team, the systems in use, or why the role existed. From the candidate’s side there was nothing to want. Strong engineers are not short of options, and they choose based on the work. If the ad does not describe the work, they move on without a second thought.
4. The profile is genuinely rare
Sometimes the ad is good and the market is simply thin. Certain data engineering, security and platform specific profiles are scarce in Portugal, and no amount of rewriting changes that. This is the one case where a better ad will not rescue the search. It is also the case where waiting is most expensive, because the project rarely waits with you.
What a stuck role puts at risk
While the ad stays online, three things happen quietly.
Projects slip. The roadmap was built on the assumption that the person would join in month one. By month four the roadmap has moved, and the delay is usually recorded as a delivery problem rather than a hiring one. The two get separated in the reporting, which is exactly how the real cause stays invisible.
Teams absorb the gap. The work does not disappear, it gets shared out. In practice it lands on whoever is most capable of picking it up, which means the strongest people carry an extra load for months. That is how a hiring problem quietly becomes a retention problem.
Knowledge leaves. This is the one companies feel last and regret most. When someone resigns, notice periods in Portugal give thirty or sixty days. Replacing a specialist usually takes longer than that. So the person leaves, the knowledge leaves with them, and the replacement arrives months later with nobody left to learn from.
What companies can do
Fix the ad first. It costs nothing, it takes an afternoon, and it resolves the majority of cases.
Split anything that is really two roles. Separate what the person must have on day one from what they can learn in the first six months, then cut the rest. Name the project, the team and the technical context, because that is what a good candidate is actually deciding on. And check that the salary matches the profile you described rather than the profile you hoped for. Most of the stuck ads I read could be performing very differently within a week of being rewritten.
If the profile is genuinely rare, or the project cannot wait for a search that will take another quarter, then it is worth saying plainly that permanent hiring is not the only route. A qualified professional can hold the role while the search continues. The work moves, the team stops absorbing the gap, and the company gets to hire on its own timeline instead of under pressure. Those two things are not in competition: the search carries on, the delivery does not stop.
What I would avoid is the middle option, which is also the most common one. Leaving the ad exactly as it is and waiting another sixty days to see whether the market changes. It usually does not.
What comes next
Every month we are going to track tech job ads in Portugal and publish what we find: which roles stay open longest, which sectors wait the most, and which requirements are quietly making roles unfillable. We are calling it the Stuck Roles Index, and the first edition follows shortly.
If you manage hiring for a technical team, it is worth following. And if you have an ad that has been online since June, it is worth reading it once more as if you were the person it is meant to attract.
The search carries on, the delivery does not stop.
If you have a role that has been open longer than it should, you can see how Team Augmentation works here.
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