Across Scooter's hiring data, immediate availability is by far the largest single bucket among sales candidates, roughly half of all candidates with notice-period data can start right away. Thirty days is the next largest group, followed by fifteen days. Ninety days barely registers as a realistic target in real hiring conversations. Here's what the data actually supports, and how experienced hiring managers use it.
The Numbers
Across the full candidate pool: immediate availability accounts for the largest share, followed by 30-day notice, then 15-day notice, with 60-day and 90-day notice making up a much smaller portion. But this varies meaningfully by seniority.
In Scooter's GTM Engineer pipeline, immediate availability accounts for roughly 6 in 10 candidates, with 15-day and 30-day notice making up most of the rest, and 60 or 90-day notice a small minority. Business Development Representative candidates show a similar pattern, over half available immediately.
Enterprise Account Executive candidates look different: immediate availability drops to under half, and 60-day notice shows up roughly three to five times more often than it does for BDR or GTM Engineer roles. The more senior the role, the longer the realistic notice period, worth building into your hiring timeline from the start rather than discovering it at offer stage.
What Hiring Managers Actually Do With This
The clearest pattern across founder conversations: 30 days is the preferred maximum. One company set a hard 30-day cap. Another preferred candidates at one month or under, and would only accept 60-day candidates if that period could be credibly negotiated down to 30 to 45 days.
Long notice periods don't just delay a start date, they threaten whether you get the hire at all. One founder saw 2 to 4 week delays between interview stages cause candidates to lose momentum and accept other offers entirely. Another company's standard was that candidates can't reasonably be expected to wait more than 4 to 5 days between interview rounds, full stop.
Turning a 30-Day Notice Into Useful Time
Immediate or short notice tends to matter most for urgent or replacement hires, where a role has sat open too long already. But 30-day notice isn't dead time if you use it deliberately. One founder's approach: have the incoming hire spend their notice period building a first draft of the sales playbook, documenting common objections, and analyzing recorded sales calls, so day one is a running start instead of a cold one.
On Buying Out Notice Periods
There's no clean, standard buyout policy in the hiring conversations behind this data, no fixed budget or common precedent for paying a candidate's current employer to release them early. The more common approach is negotiating a 60-day notice down toward 30 to 45 days rather than assuming a buyout is on the table. If a candidate is already serving notice, treat their actual joining timeline as a real factor in the offer decision, not a detail to sort out after they've accepted.
Practical benchmark: 30 days or under is the target range. 60 days is workable only with a verified, specific plan to bring it down. 90 days should generally be treated as a hard pass unless the role and candidate are exceptional enough to justify the wait. Whatever the number, move your own interview process fast enough that it isn't the reason you lose the hire.