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.
Read full article here
You need speed to get quality, and you need quality to get speed.