Clients who ghost their own hiring process, how do you handle it?

I'm not talking about candidate ghosting.

Role is open, urgency is high, you submit strong profiles. Silence for a week. You follow up, get a "we'll review soon." Another week passes. Two of your three candidates have moved on by the time the client schedules interviews.

Feedback when it comes is usually "they weren't quite right." But the brief changed halfway through, or budget sign-off was still pending, or the hiring manager and department head wanted different things and nobody said so out loud.

A few things I'm curious about from others running into this:

• Do you build feedback turnaround times into your agreements upfront, or have you stopped fighting that battle?
• How do you tell whether a role is ready to hire for before you've spent two weeks sourcing?
• Has anyone found a way to flag internal misalignment early without putting the client on the defensive?