Why Hiring for Speed Often Backfires - And How to Balance Quality and Time-to-Hire

Hiring quickly can seem vital in today’s fast-moving tech world, but rushing to fill roles often creates more headaches than solutions. As Mobilunity’s Staff Services Director with over a decade in IT HR leadership, I’ve seen that emphasizing speed alone leads to costly mis-hires, team disruption, and burned bridges with top talent. In this article I explain why a quick hire can backfire and share data-driven strategies (backed by recent research and Mobilunity’s experience) to balance hiring speed with quality.

The High-Stakes Tech Talent Market

Tech companies are in fierce competition for engineers. Developers often juggle multiple offers, and any delay risks losing them. In fact, industry data warn that “candidates often have multiple offers, so slow hiring can be fatal”. We learned this firsthand at Mobilunity: by streamlining our recruitment steps we respond faster and partner with niche recruiters to reach passive candidates quickly. This agility helped us win against tough candidates. However, speed is only half the solution. A hire’s skill, cultural fit, and long-term performance still matter most.

The Hidden Costs of Rushed Hires

A quick hire may feel like progress, but skipping steps often leads to a bad fit. The true costs of a mis-hire can far exceed the new employee’s salary. For example, one analysis found that an engineer with a £60,000 salary who proved a poor fit ended up costing £181,000 when you tally lost productivity, mentor time, re-recruiting and rework. Most of that extra cost came from wasted senior engineers’ time, lower team productivity and delayed product work - issues that ripple through the organization. In other words, that hire cost 3× the base salary before it became obvious they weren’t working out. In tech, even a single bad hire can set back entire projects and demoralize your team.

Why Speed Feels Necessary - And Why It Can Be a Trap

Leadership pressure often pushes us to “just hire someone, fast” when deadlines slip or teams burn out. It feels like solving the problem immediately. Yet that urgency risks lowering the bar. A candidate who can start tomorrow might lack the collaboration style or judgment your team needs. And once hired, it often takes months to realize the mismatch and replace them. In practice, we found that rushing without proper checks usually ends up taking far longer. We balance speed by focusing first on which steps we can compress (like faster scheduling) while never cutting critical evaluations of skill and fit.

Industry Focus Shifting from Speed to Quality

The hiring market is even proving this lesson statistically. Recent benchmarks show that quality of hire has overtaken speed in importance. One 2025 report found 31% of companies now rank quality of hire as their top ROI metric, while only 18% put time-to-fill first. In other words, firms recognize that a quick hire who stays and excels is far more valuable than a fast hire who quits or underperforms. At Mobilunity we’ve adopted the same mindset: we measure each hire’s outcomes (retention, performance, client feedback) rather than just celebrating a filled headcount. This shift means building a process that weeds out risky hires, even if it takes a bit longer upfront.

Balancing Speed with Robust Screening

Adding just two extra interview steps often makes a world of difference. One study found that including two focused evaluation points (for example, a hands-on coding session and a team-fit discussion) might add about two weeks to the process, but reduces mis-hires by roughly 60%. In other words, those extra two weeks save what could be six or more months of fixing a bad hire. So at Mobilunity, we use coding challenges and real-world scenarios to test problem-solving, plus conversations about how candidates handle collaboration and feedback. (For example, we might ask: “Tell me about a time you disagreed strongly on a technical decision – what happened?”). These steps take care in scheduling, but they flag misalignment early. The result: we place far fewer engineers who later fail our projects.

Respect the Candidate Experience

Hiring fast should never mean ghosting candidates or cutting corners on communication. In fact, today’s IT candidates expect transparency and responsiveness. Industry surveys show 86% of HR professionals say recruiting has become part marketing - meaning every interaction with candidates is a chance to strengthen your brand. We take this seriously. When a role stays open, our recruiters immediately inform candidates of the timeline and set clear expectations. As Mobilunity’s hiring guide bluntly puts it, “it is easy to lose a worthy candidate to your competitor by simply making them wait.”. Giving updates and feedback actually builds goodwill: a respectful, transparent process “strengthens your reputation and builds a future pipeline”. In practice, this means even if our process stretches longer for quality checks, we keep candidates engaged through prompt replies and help them understand each step.

Practical Takeaways: How We Balance Speed and Quality

• Accelerate without skipping the tough parts. Use recruiters or automation for scheduling and initial screens, but keep key evaluation steps. For example, Mobilunity partners with specialized recruiters to scout candidates quickly, while our core team handles deep interviews.
• Use structured interviews. Include technical tests and culture-fit probes. We give candidates real coding tasks and ask scenario questions (e.g. handling past conflicts) to see how they think, not just what they know. These targeted assessments add only days, but cut mis-hire risk by ~60%.
• Communicate clearly. Always set a timeline and send updates. Treat every candidate well: as one report noted, a candidate-driven process with transparency and speed “strengthens your reputation”. We tell applicants roughly when to expect feedback, and explain any delays, so good people stay interested even if hiring takes longer.
• Measure quality, not just speed. Track retention and performance of new hires as your true success metric. Remember, a hire who stays a year and delivers great code is worth more than one who filled a seat in two weeks. Industry data confirms 31% of firms now treat quality of hire as the top ROI metric (versus only 18% for speed). We view longer-term success as the ultimate goal.
• Leverage tools wisely. Use HR technology to move fast on admin tasks (for instance, automating resume screening or interview scheduling), so your team can spend more time on human evaluation. Our recruiters use data analytics and streamlined processes to shorten pipeline stages without reducing thoroughness.

Conclusion: The Balanced Hiring Edge

In summary, treating hiring as an ongoing learning process is key. Rush too much and you risk mis-hires that cost exponentially more time and money than you saved. Instead, combine data-driven discipline with a human touch. At Mobilunity we do this by constantly measuring our funnel, refining each step, and never sacrificing candidate experience. By balancing speed and quality - using targeted interview steps, clear communication, and analytics - we build stronger, more loyal development teams. Other tech firms can adopt the same approach: move efficiently, but remember that a great hire is worth the extra effort of a thoughtful process

Author: Yulia Borysenko - Staff Services Director at Mobilunity
With 10+ years in IT HR leadership, Yulia leads Mobilunity’s cross-functional HR team using data-driven strategies for hiring, workforce planning, and development. She believes in marrying technical rigor with people-first practices, and these insights reflect both industry research and our hands-on experience.