A small team can decide in four to six weeks: one week on requirements, two on demos, two on hands-on evaluation, one on contracting. Larger organisations with security review and procurement typically need three to four months. Set the end date before you start, because unbounded evaluations lose stakeholders faster than they gather evidence.
Five stages, and each has a natural size. Requirements and internal alignment take roughly a week for a small team, since most of the effort is documenting a process people already follow. Research and shortlisting take a few days if you are disciplined about the criteria. Demos take about two weeks, allowing for calendar reality across three to five vendors. Hands-on evaluation on real hiring takes two to four weeks, and this is the stage worth protecting when the schedule slips. Contracting and security review take a week for a small company and considerably longer where legal and procurement are centralised. The pattern to avoid is compressing the hands-on stage because the earlier stages overran, since that is the only stage producing evidence rather than impressions.
Almost always for organisational reasons rather than analytical ones. A stakeholder cannot attend, so a demo slips two weeks. A new requirement appears late and earlier vendors have to be revisited. Security review starts after the commercial decision instead of alongside it. Someone senior asks to see one more option. Each individual delay looks reasonable and the cumulative effect is a process that dies quietly at month five with no decision made. Counter it with three habits: fixed dates published at the start, a named decision owner rather than a committee, and a rule that new requirements arriving after the freeze must be justified in writing. Starting the security review in parallel with demos removes the single most common cause of a late stall.
When the switching cost is high or the risk profile is unusual. Multi-country hiring with different data rules, an integration into payroll or HRIS that carries real engineering effort, several business units with conflicting processes, or a regulated environment all justify additional time, because the cost of getting it wrong is measured in years rather than months. Migrating a large history of candidate records also warrants extra planning time, since the mapping and cleanup work is usually underestimated. What does not justify extra months is indecision dressed as diligence. If the additional time is not producing new evidence against a written criterion, it is producing delay. Understanding [what an ATS rollout involves](/ats-implementation) early helps you size the timeline honestly rather than discovering it after signature.
Run the stages in parallel where they do not depend on each other, and keep a single visible tracker. Security questionnaires can go out during the demo stage. Reference calls can happen while the hands-on trial runs. Contract review can begin on the leading option before the final decision, provided everyone understands it is conditional. Hold a short weekly checkpoint with the same small group rather than a long meeting whenever people are available. Publish the scoring as it accumulates so the decision is never a surprise. Most importantly, book the decision meeting on day one and keep it in the calendar even if the process wobbles, since an existing date creates pressure to produce the evidence needed to use it.
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