Ideas like "hire right, hire fast" and "hire right, fire fast" have been buzzwords in the business world for some time now. The reason for this is the ever-evolving talent market. With companies constantly trying to find ways to stay ahead of their competition and hire top talent, new strategies and tactics come to the forefront. One such tactic is "fast hiring."

Hire Fast Meaning in Business

Fast hiring, as the name suggests, refers to a recruitment process that aims to fill vacant positions quickly to see whether a candidate will perform up to company expectations. As the polar opposite of "slow hiring" which uses a lengthy and careful consideration process, "hire fast" is a quick and streamlined approach to hiring that focuses on filling the position immediately and letting the candidate showcase their proficiency in the role as a somewhat "ongoing interview." If the candidate performs well they stay employed, if not, they're cut.

As you can imagine, there are definite positive attributes to this methodology, but there are also huge downsides as well. In this article, we will dive into the concept of fast hiring and its potential impact on your business. We will explore its pros and cons to give you a better understanding of whether or not it is a strategy your company should consider. Finally, we'll close with some myths and misconceptions about the topic that may inform your decision to use the method or not.

How to Hire Fast

To implement a fast hiring interview process effectively, organizations must streamline their recruitment strategies to only include the key steps to ensure candidate quality - these would include:

1. Craft Clear Job Descriptions: Highlight essential qualifications for applicants to understand expectations clearly.
2. Use Technology: Employ Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS), interview intelligence, and automation tools to manage talent effectively.
3. Expand Talent Pool: Engage with passive candidates and utilize social media, job boards, and networks for broader reach.
4. Streamline Interviews: Conduct initial screenings via phone or video calls for quick candidate assessment.
5. Enable Decisive Decision-Making: Empower managers with clear guidelines for swift decisions, reducing approval layers.
6. Offer Competitive Packages: Provide attractive compensation and benefits swiftly to attract top talent.
7. Build Talent Pipeline: Maintain pre-screened candidates for future vacancies, reducing time to hire.

Pros and Cons of Fast Hiring

Pros:

1. Fill Positions Quickly: The obvious benefit of fast hiring is the ability to fill vacant positions quickly. This allows for work to continue without interruption and ensures productivity is not affected.
2. Cost Savings: With a streamlined hiring process, companies can save money on recruitment costs such as advertising, agency fees, and time spent by HR personnel.
3. Candidate Quality: Fast hiring tends to attract candidates who are actively seeking employment, resulting in a larger pool of qualified candidates to choose from.

Cons:

1. Cultural Fit: Fast hiring does not allow for a thorough assessment of cultural fit, potentially leading to hiring someone who is not a good fit for the company culture.
2. Employee Retention: With a quick hiring process, there may be some risk of not being able to fully assess a candidate's skills and qualifications, leading to potential turnover if the hire is not the right fit.
3. Limited Diversity: Fast hiring may overlook diverse candidates who may need extra time or accommodation in the hiring process, leading to a less diverse workforce.

Impact Of Fast Hiring On Business

We alluded to the potential impact of fast hiring on business in the last section, but let's go a level deeper. Depending on the type of role you're hiring, hiring fast may have a distinctly positive impact on your business. For example, if you're a retailer hiring temporary staff for the holiday season, it makes sense to have a fast hiring process. This allows you to meet demand and ensure operations run smoothly during this busy time of year while cutting employees who aren't a fit.

On the other hand, if you are looking to fill a management or executive-level role, fast hiring may not be the best approach. At these levels, one of the biggest costs to a company is loss of knowledge. Loss of knowledge is the expertise and know-how a key employee possesses that makes them valuable to a company. Using a hire-fast approach for upper management roles could result in someone new to the business making changes that don't align with what the market, team, or customers really need.

Hire-fast HR solutions are somewhat of a new phenomena. Over the last decade, the keyword "Hire Fast" has only experienced a handful of spikes, according to Google Trends. One of the fastest spikes happened in March of 2020 as C19 rocked the global economy and resulted in huge workforce shortages across tech, manufacturing, and medical fields. Nurses and other essential medical professionals were in high demand. Most organizations had to act fast to fill positions with qualified candidates, or risk being understaffed.

With the rise of remote work and digital job platforms, it has also become easier for companies to quickly recruit and hire talent from anywhere in the world. This has allowed businesses to expand their reach and access a larger pool of talented candidates, making fast hiring a more viable strategy.

But it's also led to challenges in hiring. One potential negative impact of fast hiring is employee retention. When candidates are hired quickly without thorough assessments, there is a higher risk of them not being the right fit for the company culture or the role itself. This can lead to dissatisfaction and ultimately, high turnover rates. As we mentioned earlier, this also leaves room for companies to miss out on diverse candidates who may need extra time and fall through the cracks.

If you want to mitigate some of these challenges, here are some tips and strategies for fast hiring:

• Prioritize diversity and inclusion in your hiring process to ensure a diverse pool of candidates
• Use technology like interview intelligence software and automation to streamline the recruitment process, but also make sure to incorporate personal interactions and assessments for a more thorough evaluation of candidates
• Clearly define the role and its qualifications before starting the hiring process to avoid making rushed decisions based on urgent needs
• Continuously review employee performance and your hiring processes to ensure they are efficient and also effective.

Finally, fire fast. If you're going to adopt a hire-fast methodology, you must also be willing to fire equally quickly. Once you know a candidate isn't a good fit, kindly let them go. There may be some legal implications in your state to how you handle this situation (so check these laws to ensure compliance), but in many states, work is considered "at will," and companies do not need a cause to terminate an employee who is underperforming.

Myths And Misconceptions About Fast Hiring

There are plenty of myths and misconceptions about fast hiring, let's try to cover a few of them as we close this article. The first misconception is that fast hiring will be a panacea to all of your recruitment problems. While "hire fast" meaning, "getting candidates in the door quicker," does infer an increase in velocity, it doesn't necessarily mean that they will be the right fit for the role or the company. It's important to realize that hiring is a dynamic function and will constantly require measurement, forethought, and strategy to achieve the best results.

Another common myth is that hiring fast means cutting corners in the recruitment process. This is not necessarily true if done correctly. As mentioned earlier, technology can aid in streamlining the hiring process, but it's important to still incorporate a qualification process into your recruitment strategy. Cutting corners and not thoroughly vetting candidates can lead to far larger issues down the line, such as a negative impact on company culture, brand, and even customers.

Lastly, hiring fast is cheaper than hiring slow. This misconception comes with a lot of variability so let's see if we can clear things up. Research done by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) showed that the average cost of a bad hire can equal up to five times their annual salary in lost productivity, recruitment fees, and training costs.

Much of the research following poor hiring decisions tracks hiring the wrong candidate and keeping them for a set term (most often over a year) - which can be extremely costly for the company. However, this will not be the case if you also take on a "fire faster" mentality. 

We're seeing many new trends in the market that many companies aren't equipped to address. One example of this is a recent post from Workable that included an interesting statistic, "...most talented people are off the market in 10 days, the shorter your time-to-hire, the better." Now they didn't state their source for this data, but it brings an interesting perspective into the conversation... "Is time-to-hire decreasing dramatically today? And if so, how does HR plan and prepare for this change to keep up with the competition?"

In closing, these are the questions you'll need to address when tackling the unique challenges of your role. If you'd like to see how interview intelligence can streamline your interviews and evaluate candidates' skills more efficiently, book a demo to chat with our team today!