ScopeAT

TL;DR — You need speed to get quality, and you need quality to get speed.

Sometimes, with unrealistic hiring managers, we in recruiting need to explain tradeoffs between speed, quality, and cost. 

Cheap and fast doesn’t always get you quality. Quality and cheap? It can take forever to find, and underpaid people become a flight risk. Fast, quality hires? Definitely possible, especially if you pay well and have a great process built for quality. But often companies don’t want to pay for quality.

Now, is it possible to get all three at scale? 

Absolutely. Especially if you pay above-market salaries and employ great recruiters and hiring managers who are invested in hiring great talent.

In this article, though, I want to explore the relationship between speed and quality. Specifically, how you need quality to get speed, and how you need speed to get quality.

We need quality to get speed

My team and I study funnel metrics across all kinds of interesting, complex organizations. When we see skinny funnels, with conversion rates of 2:1 screen:interview, 3:1 interview:offer, and close to 1:1 offer:accept, it’s typically because of one of two things. 

One possibility is that quality is well-defined, the recruiting team has dedicated sourcing resources, the company pays well, hiring managers have urgency to hire, and hiring teams are well aligned with a high hiring bar focus. The other possibility is that the hiring teams aren’t focused on quality, and instead are focused on hiring warm bodies. 

What? 

Yep, hiring teams with a “butt in seat” orientation can also have a skinny funnel and fill roles quickly. 

So, your skinny funnels — which generally mean faster hires — can be a symptom of either strong (early) filtering or no filtering for quality. With a super-high quality orientation when you source and screen, your mid-funnel gets super skinny; you interview three to four candidates to make one hire. Also, with very little filtering and low regard for quality, almost anyone sourced gets hired.

But my main point here is that quality candidates go through the process faster. If hiring managers can count on a slate of qualified, interested, available, affordable (QIAA) screened candidates from us, they don’t need to screen 20 and interview 10 and spend one to three weeks deliberating on which of the three finalists to hire.

From 1998 to 2005, I worked at early Amazon, where I led tech recruiting. The work our hiring teams invested in defining quality up front led to much faster hiring. And because we needed to scale our engineering teams quickly, we invested in a well-defined hiring bar, efficient process, hiring decision inspection and accountability mechanisms, above-average compensation (offers), and a “hungry shall feed” prioritization process that ensured hiring teams who were more invested in hiring got more hires, got faster hires.

Surprise, surprise: Hiring managers often understand the relationship between speed and quality

Today, as consultants with Recruiting Toolbox, we lead focus groups with a lot of hiring managers and executives. And often their No. 1 request of their TA team is to focus more on quality and quantity. Specifically, they want more high-quality candidates at the top of the funnel.

I feel a bit like I’m contradicting something I say all the time, that “Speed is the love language of hiring managers.” But I’m not. You see, they still want speed. In fact, when we lead focus groups with recruiters, they often tell us some version of, “My hiring managers will say quality is their No. 1 priority, but really, they act like speed is their top priority.”

I think our hiring managers may actually understand the relationship between speed and quality.

Many hiring managers do want quality, but they’re also under incredible pressure to fill their roles, so they push for speed. They get understandably frustrated by sourcing, screening, scheduling, interviewing, decision, and approval processes that are slow, partially because they know we’ll miss out on quality if we can’t move candidates through our funnel quickly.

Back to consulting. When we see hiring teams that have sped up their time to fill significantly, it’s usually about 50% attributable to better tech, tools, process, and resources. 

What’s the other 50%? It’s quality. Quality talent just goes through the process faster.

We need speed to get quality

Quick story time: A senior tech recruiter on my team back in the early 2000s — Chetta Crowley — had sourced a very high profile candidate (ex-Apple) who was already in the recruiting process with a big tech competitor for a senior role. 

When she reached out to him to get him interested, he was hesitant to engage. He’d just completed round one of interviews with a company in the Bay Area, and our role was based in Seattle. He thought it’d be best to finish up with the Bay Area company’s process first, and then if it wasn’t a good match, he’d engage with us after. But that’s not what happened.

To the best of my recollection, it went something like this on our side:

Day 1: Contact by recruiter.

Day 2: Connect the candidate with a senior leader (hiring manager) on our team and get the candidate interested in an onsite visit/interview.

Day 4: Onsite interview, same-day hiring decision, preclose on offer.

Day 5: FedExed the offer (remember, this is pre-DocuSign).

Day 7: Offer accepted.

Day 10: Relocated to Seattle into temporary housing.

Day 11: Started in his new role.

Now, are you ready for this?

Day 15: The big tech company with whom he had completed first-round interviews contacts him to schedule the second round of interviews. Of course, not only had he already accepted our offer, he had already moved into temporary housing and was working out of his new office with us.

In those two weeks, we sourced, screened, sold, interviewed, offered, got an acceptance, got travel booked, got him in temp housing, and got him an office so he could start in his job. When I first met him — and to be clear, this wasn’t a high-volume midlevel software engineering hire that we’d built a hiring machine around — he told me the story of how quickly we moved and how he kind of felt bad for how slowly the other big tech company moved.

Now, would we have been able to hire him if we’d had something other than a five-day sourced-to-offer accept timeline?

Probably not. It was our compelling opportunity and speed and engaged, decisive hiring manager that allowed us to get this candidate, who — by the way — now has his own Wikipedia page and was a world-class inventor of a lot of the tech we take for granted today.

But John, that sounds like a one-off?

Well, if you’ve ever competed against Amazon’s recruiting machine, with its Bar Raiser interviewing process, its decisive, often same- or next-day hiring decision, its competitive offers, and its push for quick start dates, you know that this kind of stuff scaled after I left in 2005. The culture had incorporated a recruiting mindset, with urgency and accountability that made it possible for a giant company like Amazon to still move quickly. Not just for hourly roles — I’m talking highly paid, relocation-involved, complex offers as well.

When I reflect on my time at Amazon, there’s no question we were able to get quality because we could move faster than most companies. We could swoop in and get candidates through the entire process before many traditional companies had even completed the first phone screen.

The same principles govern hiring for hourly roles

Now, let’s talk about hourly hiring for a minute. Because the same “speed to get quality” principle applies.

I was talking to a TA leader who hires over 100,000 people a year into high-volume hourly roles. Through automation and 24/7 conversational AI, his organization was able to reduce time to fill from about 13 days to less than three days. Among other things, they scheduled 85% of their interviews in under an hour. 

They were able to save the company significant time and money — tens of millions of dollars and a ton of recruiter headcount. Even more importantly, every vacancy cost them money, so they were able to help drive revenue by filling vacant roles faster. So, speed led to efficiency and cost savings, but what’s the connection to quality, John? I’m glad you asked.

For many hourly workers, if they lose their job on a Thursday, they need to be working by Monday or Tuesday. In days, not weeks. And a motivated candidate who needs to work may apply to 10 or more jobs per day. And guess what? The employers who move quickly get access to better quality talent pools because of their speed advantage. 

If a TA team or a hiring manager is taking five to six days to schedule, ghosting people post-screen, and putting the candidate through any kind of testing or interview process, they’re looking at one and a half to two weeks to make a hire. But more importantly, the employers who take under three days to contact, reply, screen, interview, offer, and get all paperwork signed, will just crush the employers who are slow.

It’ll be like the Amazon example above — fast employers will get top talent, and slow employers will more likely get access to only a fraction of the talent pool because they’re just too slow to engage and interview.

It’s not just hiring managers who want speed. Quality candidates do, too

Quality candidates — at every level — will almost always prefer employers with fast-to-reply, fast-to-schedule, fast-to-interview, and fast-to-decide employers over slow employers.

And hiring managers? After the post-Covid hiring experiences, they want quality over speed. They’ve lived with the pain of rushed hires and overhiring and they want to avoid bad hires. But I’m here to tell you that that doesn’t mean hiring teams should slow down and employ a “take your time to find the ideal candidate” process. 

Instead, they should build out a speedy, decisive process that’s built for quality hiring. I’m here to argue that you actually need speed to get quality, and need quality to get speed.

And finally, I want to reinforce this important point: Moving quickly gets you access to a bigger, more available talent pool. Slow-moving employers get access to the candidates left over after the fast-moving recruiters and hiring teams have already engaged and hired the best talent.

Let’s wrap up with some recommendations.

Final thoughts: These are proven steps to get both quality and speed

Some are obvious and don’t require any new tech at all.

• Spend more time defining “what good looks like” up front. Beyond the job description, really dig into what’s required, and what’s “hit the ground learning.” 
• Calibrate interviewing teams to improve speed to alignment. Misalignment is the root of all evil in recruiting, and one of the most frequent causes of slower time-to-fill metrics and fat funnels.
• Reserve interview days that end with same-day hiring decision-making. I share more about how companies do this in this video from LinkedIn Talent Connect. 
• Train your interviewers and ensure they have well-defined hiring criteria, including a focus on intrinsic motivation.
• Get preapprovals on levels, compensation, start dates, relocation, immigration, etc.
  • One of our recent clients had an executive who told me that they needed 12 compensation exception approvals for the last 12 offers they made. Each exception added at least a week of wasted time to the process. And obviously, if 12 of 12 required exception approvals, you need to rethink your salary ranges. He asked me: “Where is the leadership from TA on this? How much quality talent will I lose because we’re not calibrated to market reality wages and require an extra week to present an offer? I will lose out to faster companies because of this.”
  • Here are some great, free resources to help us all show up as Talent Advisors and lead more effectively. 

I wrote an article about the taxes we pay in TA based on some of the bad choices we make or let our hiring manager community make. Often, companies aren’t getting both speed and quality because of choices they’re making internally. Not because of the external market, not because of some compliance issue, and definitely not because of their ATS. But because of choices they made and are making to have an approach to hiring — systems, processes, resources, approvals, etc. — that is just not built for speed and quality.

What are you doing to get both speed and quality for the hiring teams you work with? I’ll post this on my LinkedIn profile and would love to learn from you.

John Vlastelica is a former corporate recruiting leader with Amazon and Expedia turned consultant. He and his team at Recruiting Toolbox are hired by world-class companies to train hiring managers and recruiters, coach and train TA leaders, and help raise the bar on who they hire and how they hire. If you’re seeking more best practices, check out the free resources for recruiters at TalentAdvisor.com and for recruiting leaders at RecruitingLeadership.com. And if you’re a head of TA from a large company, check out www.RLL50.com for info on our special workshop just for senior recruiting leaders, where we’ll dig into the impact of AI on our TA orgs, redefine the role of the recruiter, and dig into best practices for driving adoption of new tech and role expectations with our recruiters and hiring managers.

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