RGH

There’s something the recruitment industry has been reluctant to say out loud: the obsession with speed in hiring is now creating more problems than it solves.

The logic made sense for a time. Move quickly, secure talent, keep momentum. In 2021, when the market was aggressive and candidates disappeared overnight, hesitation came at a cost. But that environment has significantly changed. Hiring demand has stabilised, candidate availability has increased, and yet processes have become slower and less coherent.

In 2025, the average time to hire has stretched to around 68 days across many sectors, more than double what it was just a few years ago (SelectSoftware Reviews, 2025) because businesses are making decisions in fragments. More stages, more stakeholders, more rethinking. Speed hasn’t been replaced by rigour; it’s been replaced by noise.

Despite this, the idea that faster hiring is inherently better still lingers. Somewhere along the way, decisiveness became a substitute for judgement.

This is where the cost begins to surface.

Estimates from the U.S. Department of Labor continue to suggest that a bad hire can cost up to 30% of that individual’s first-year salary. More recent market data places the average closer to $15,000 – $20,000 for mid-level roles, with significantly higher exposure for senior hires once lost productivity, internal time, and replacement costs are factored in (CareerBuilder, 2025; SHRM, 2026). These are not isolated incidents. Around three quarters of employers admit they have made the wrong hiring decision at some point. This has become more of a pattern than an occasional error.
And the pattern is familiar.

A candidate interviews well. They’re articulate, credible, and know how to present their experience. The process moves quickly, often under pressure to fill the role. Feedback is positive. The offer is made. But within a few months, the reality of the role begins to diverge from what was assessed. The complexity is higher. The environment is less predictable. Expectations are less aligned than initially assumed. What looked like a strong hire in a controlled setting starts to weaken under real conditions.

This is a failure of the process rather than the individual.

When hiring is rushed, rigour is the first thing to fall away. There is less time to challenge assumptions, less opportunity for stakeholders to align on what success actually looks like, and very little space to differentiate between someone who performs well in an interview and someone who performs when conditions become difficult. Interviews reward confidence, fluency and rapport. They are not designed to replicate pressure, ambiguity or commercial reality.

There is also a quieter issue that tends to go unnoticed. Misalignment.

In compressed processes, different stakeholders often carry slightly different interpretations of the role. Those differences are rarely surfaced properly, let alone resolved. The result is a hire made against an inconsistent brief. When performance does not meet expectations, the issue is often attributed to the individual, when in reality the role itself was never clearly defined.

The irony is that the market no longer demands this level of urgency.

Recent data shows that while hiring timelines have lengthened, candidate drop-off is far more closely linked to poor communication and lack of clarity than to process duration (LinkedIn Talent Insights, 2025). Candidates are not rejecting opportunities because the process takes an extra week, but they are stepping away when the experience feels disorganised or inconsistent. A rushed process signals something about how decisions are made inside the business. In many cases, that signal is accurate.

The organisations that are navigating this well are not the fastest they’re the most deliberate.

They define the role properly before entering the market, assess against clear criteria rather than instinct, they ensure that the people involved in the decision are genuinely aligned, not simply present. It may take slightly longer, but it produces decisions that hold under pressure. That is the real test.

Longitudinal hiring data continues to show that a significant proportion of new hires fail to meet expectations within the first 12 to 18 months, with only a minority delivering clear, sustained success (SHRM, 2026). In a market where every hire carries more scrutiny, more cost, and more strategic weight than it did even three years ago, that margin for error is difficult to justify.
The question is no longer how quickly a role can be filled.

It is whether the decision still stands six months later, when the role has evolved, pressure has increased, and the realities of the business are fully exposed.

Speed was never the point… getting it right was.