Latest / Hiring & Firing with Fexingo: Recruitment, Performance, and Workforce Decisions / The Hidden Cost of Hiring Fast
Transcript
- Lucas: If you look at the standard recruitment dashboard today, the number one metric most companies are obsessing over is time to fill. It makes sense on paper. You have an open seat, revenue is leaking out of that gap, and every day it stays empty costs you money. So, naturally, everyone wants to close that loop as fast as possible. Luna: But I think we’re ignoring the other side of that equation. How fast can someone actually become productive once they walk through the door? Lucas: Exactly. That’s the blind spot. We recently looked at a case study involving a mid-sized logistics software provider that decided to slash their average hiring cycle from forty-five days down to eighteen. They treated recruitment like a supply chain problem, optimizing for throughput rather than fit. On the surface, the numbers looked incredible. They filled sixty percent more roles in the last quarter alone. Luna: And yet, I remember reading that their first-year retention dropped by nearly twenty percent in the same period. Lucas: It did. And here is the kicker: the people who left weren't just bad hires. A significant portion were solid performers who simply got overwhelmed because the onboarding process had been compressed to match the faster hiring pace. The company was bringing people in so quickly that managers didn't have the bandwidth to integrate them properly. They were throwing new hires into the deep end before they could even find the pool ladder. Luna: So they saved time upfront but paid a massive penalty in training costs and lost institutional knowledge later. Lucas: Precisely. Let's talk about the actual cost structure here. When you hire someone in four weeks instead of ten, you might save roughly fifteen thousand dollars in recruiter hours and agency fees. But if that person leaves after six months because they felt unsupported, you lose not just their salary, but the ramp-up time, the mentorship overhead, and the disruption to the team. In our example company, that quick hire ended up costing twice as much as a slower, more deliberate placement. Luna: It feels like we’ve conflated speed with efficiency. Just because you’re moving fast doesn’t mean you’re getting closer to the goal. Lucas: That is a really sharp distinction. Efficiency is about output relative to input. If the output is a broken hire, then high speed is actually low efficiency. The problem is that leadership often rewards the recruiter who closes the role fastest, regardless of the outcome. It’s a classic principal-agent problem where the incentive structure is misaligned with long-term value. Luna: Right. And recruiters are human. If my bonus depends on filling seats by Friday, I’m going to stop screening out the marginal candidates. I’ll just push them through. Lucas: You hit the nail on the head. Once that pressure starts, the interview process changes. You stop asking deep behavioral questions. You skip the technical assessments. You might even lower the bar on cultural fit because you’re afraid of losing the candidate to a competitor who moves faster. It creates a race to the bottom where the only thing that matters is closing the ticket. Luna: I’ve seen this happen in marketing teams too. They’ll bring in a contractor to fill a gap immediately, hoping to keep projects moving, but then never transition them to full-time because the initial hire was so rushed. Lucas: That’s a common workaround, but it’s expensive. Contractors usually command higher hourly rates, and you still pay for the lack of integration. Plus, you’re building a two-tier workforce, which hurts morale. The full-time employees see the contractor doing the same work for less job security and start wondering why they aren’t being treated better. It erodes trust pretty quickly. Luna: So what’s the alternative? Do we just go back to taking three months to hire someone? Because that feels equally dangerous in this market. Lucas: No, I don’t think we swing all the way back. The key is decoupling the hiring decision from the immediate operational need. Instead of trying to fill every hole instantly, companies should focus on building a bench. Keep a small pool of pre-vetted candidates who are interested but not ready to move yet. Then, when a role opens, you can pull from that bench in a week or two, rather than starting from zero. Luna: That requires a lot of relationship management upfront. It’s not a quick fix. Lucas: It isn’t. But it shifts the burden from the crisis moment to the quiet periods. Think of it like inventory management. You don’t want to be running out of stock during peak season, but you also don’t want to hold too much inventory that ties up cash. Talent is no different. You need a strategic reserve of talent that you nurture continuously. Luna: This brings me to something else. When you rush the process, you often miss the red flags that only show up in slower, deeper conversations. Like, maybe the candidate seems great on paper, but when you spend an hour discussing how they handled failure, they deflect or blame others. Lucas: Those soft signals are critical. In a rushed interview, you might skim over that part. You might accept a vague answer because you’re checking boxes. But those vague answers often predict poor collaboration later on. We saw this with a project manager who seemed perfect on resume. But when asked about a past conflict, he couldn’t articulate his own role in the resolution. He got the job because they were desperate. Six months later, he was involved in three separate disputes with his direct reports. Luna: It’s funny how we treat interviews like a test where there’s a right answer, when really they’re more like a chemistry check. You need time to see if things react well together. Lucas: Chemistry is a good word for it. And chemistry takes time to develop. You can’t force a reaction by turning up the heat too quickly. That’s where the real damage happens. Leaders feel like they’re being pragmatic by hiring fast, but they’re actually being reckless. They’re trading stability for convenience. Luna: I wonder if this is partly why so many companies struggle with remote work now. If you’re hiring remotely, you already have less visibility into a person’s daily habits. Speeding up the process removes the little checks you do have, like reference calls or extended trial periods. Lucas: That’s a strong point. Remote hiring requires rigor, not less, because you can’t rely on ambient observation. You can’t watch someone work across the room. You have to ask better questions and wait longer for the answers. But the trend is still toward speed. Everyone is trying to optimize for the next quarter. Luna: It feels like we’re seeing the aftermath of the pandemic hiring spree. Companies hired too fast then, and now they’re paying for it with restructuring costs. Lucas: Absolutely. The lag effect is real. The mistakes made in twenty-twenty-two are showing up as inefficiencies in twenty-six. It’s a reminder that labor markets are slow-moving systems. You can’t just flip a switch and expect instant results without friction. Luna: So, if I’m a hiring manager listening to this, what’s one concrete change I can make tomorrow to slow down without looking incompetent? Lucas: Start by changing your internal SLA. Instead of promising stakeholders that you’ll have a candidate in five days, set a realistic expectation of two weeks. Use that extra time to conduct a structured debrief with your interview panel. Most companies skip this step. They just say yes or no. But spending thirty minutes aligning on what ‘good’ looks like prevents mis-hires later. Luna: That’s actually quite simple. It’s just forcing a conversation that usually gets skipped because everyone is busy. Lucas: Right. And it makes the hiring decision a team sport rather than a solo sprint. It reduces the bias of any single interviewer. If three people take the time to discuss the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, you get a more balanced view. It slows you down slightly, but it speeds up the eventual success of the hire. Luna: I like that framing. Slowing down to speed up. It’s counterintuitive, but it makes total sense in complex environments. Lucas: It does. And it’s worth remembering that the cost of a bad hire is rarely linear. It compounds. One bad hire can drag down the performance of five good ones. So the insurance policy of taking an extra week to vet someone is incredibly cheap compared to the potential downside risk. Luna: Insurance is a great analogy. Nobody complains when you buy comprehensive coverage for your car, even though you hope you never use it. But we treat hiring like we’re driving without brakes. Lucas: Exactly. We assume everything will go smoothly until it doesn’t. And when it doesn’t, the cost is borne by the team, not the recruiter who closed the role quickly. It’s a structural issue that needs to be addressed at the executive level. Luna: Do you think AI tools are making this worse? They can screen resumes in seconds, which might encourage leaders to believe the whole process can be automated and accelerated. Lucas: I think AI is amplifying the existing bias toward speed. It makes it easier to ignore nuance. If an algorithm says a candidate is a ninety percent match, a tired hiring manager might just click approve. They’re outsourcing the judgment call to a black box. That’s dangerous. AI should assist with screening, not replace the human element of assessment. Luna: So the tool becomes a crutch for laziness rather than a lever for insight. Lucas: That’s exactly what it becomes when used incorrectly. The best companies use AI to handle the administrative burden, freeing up humans to do the heavy lifting of evaluation. But that requires discipline. You have to insist on the human touch. Luna: It comes back to intentionality. Are we hiring because we need to fill a slot, or because we need to solve a problem? Lucas: Yes. Those are two very different objectives. One is transactional. The other is strategic. If you treat hiring as a transaction, you’ll always chase speed. If you treat it as a strategic investment, you’ll protect the timeline. Luna: I think that’s the mindset shift that most leaders are missing right now. They’re managing the spreadsheet, not the people. Lucas: Spot on. And people are the asset that drives the spreadsheet. If you degrade the quality of the people, the numbers eventually follow. It’s inevitable. Luna: Before we wrap up, I want to circle back to that logistics company. Did they ever change their approach after realizing the retention drop? Lucas: They did. They implemented a probationary review at thirty days, not ninety. They realized that if a hire wasn’t integrated by then, it wasn’t going to happen. They started pulling back on the volume of new hires and focused on supporting the current cohort. Turnover stabilized within two quarters. Luna: It’s a good reminder that course correction is possible, but it’s painful. Prevention is always cheaper than cure. Lucas: Always. And prevention starts with recognizing that speed is not a virtue in itself. It’s just a variable. And like any variable, it needs to be balanced against other important factors like quality, culture, and long-term viability. Luna: Thanks for breaking that down. It’s definitely made me rethink how I view my own recent interview requests. Lucas: Glad to hear it. Next time someone asks for a same-day decision, maybe ask them why they’re in such a hurry. The answer might tell you more about the role than the job description ever could.