You’re Spending Time on the Wrong Candidates
Speed doesn't compete with quality. Speed is what makes quality possible.
Most hiring advice treats quality like it’s a context-free judgment.
“Hire A players.” “Raise the bar.” “Only hire people better than 50% of your current team.”
As if you could look at a candidate in the abstract and declare them good or bad. As if quality were something you could assess independent of the manager, the team, the moment, the actual work.
That’s not how it works. The same person who’s exceptional on one team might be mediocre on another. Someone who thrives under one manager might struggle under the next. Hiring is so context-dependent that most universal advice about “quality” is borderline useless.
You know what actually does hurt quality? Time pressure.
When you’re forced to compress your judgment—when you’re rushed, when you’re behind, when you have six more first-round interviews today and a hundred more resumes to skim—you don’t magically get better at picking. You get worse. You miss things. You default to pattern matching and gut reactions because you don’t have the space to think clearly.
That’s the real case for speed. Not speed versus quality. Speed in service of quality.
Get Back Hours, Not Cut Corners
Here’s what happens in most hiring processes:
You post a job. You get a thousand applicants. And now you’re underwater before you’ve even started.
You spend days sorting through resumes, trying to find the ones worth talking to. You schedule phone screens with people who look decent on paper. Half of them go nowhere. You do more screens. More scheduling. More coordination.
By the time you get to your finalists, the three or four candidates who might actually be great, you’re exhausted. You’re weeks behind on everything else. And you’re under pressure to just make a decision already.
So you compress your judgment. You rush through final interviews. You make calls faster than you should because you’ve already burned 40 hours on this hire and you can’t afford to burn 40 more.
That’s where quality dies. Not in the screening phase. In the decision phase when you’re too depleted to be deliberate about the thing that actually matters.
Focus, Focus, Focus
The goal isn’t to make hiring faster everywhere. It’s to be fast in the right places so you can be slow in the right places.
Sorting through resumes? That should be fast. Scheduling phone screens with unqualified candidates? That shouldn’t happen at all.
But evaluating your finalists? Understanding whether someone is right for this team, this manager, this moment? That deserves all the time you can give it.
The problem is that most hiring processes have this completely backwards. You spend endless hours on the sorting, the part that’s low judgment, and then rush through the decision, the part that’s all judgment.
What if you flipped it?
What if you could spend 30 minutes getting to your top 10 candidates instead of 30 hours? And then spend those 30 hours on the part that actually requires your brain—having real conversations, digging deep, thinking carefully about fit?
Eliminate Time Pressure
Time pressure is the enemy of good hiring decisions.
When you’re rushed, you default to shortcuts. You over-index on credentials because they’re easy to evaluate. You trust your gut when your gut doesn’t have enough information. You hire the person who interviews well instead of the person who’ll perform well.
None of this is because you’re bad at hiring. It’s because you’re making a complex, context-dependent judgment under conditions that make clear thinking almost impossible.
The fix isn’t to “get better at evaluating candidates faster.” The fix is to stop putting yourself in situations where you have to.
If you can eliminate the time sink of sorting through hundreds of unqualified applicants, you buy back the hours to be deliberate. You can actually sit with the question of whether this person is right for this role, this team, this moment. You can think instead of react.
Quality follows from that. Not from some abstract framework for identifying “A players.” From having the time and space to apply your judgment, whatever your judgment is, without a clock running down.
The Real Case for Speed
Speed and quality aren’t opposites. They’re not even tradeoffs.
Speed is what makes quality possible. When you’re not drowning in administrative screening work, you can actually do the thing that matters: seeing candidates clearly and making good decisions about fit.
Your ability to hire well isn’t limited by your judgment. It’s limited by the time pressure that prevents you from using it.
Buy back the hours. Then be deliberate where it actually matters.
This post was inspired by a conversation on the Product-Led Growth Leaders podcast. You can listen to the full episode below.