Hiring fast is not the same as hiring well, and the market keeps confusing them
Speed is easy to measure, so it’s the thing everyone optimises. Sachith Rai on the hard truth about what a rushed senior hire actually costs you two years out.
Draft. Figures marked like this are illustrative and pending verification against Recruise placement data & Sachith sign-off before publication.
The argument
- Speed is easy to measure, so the market optimises it — and quietly substitutes it for quality, which isn’t.
- A rushed senior hire doesn’t fail loudly at the start; it fails slowly, two years out, when the wrong decisions have compounded.
- Time-to-fill is a vanity metric at the top — the number that matters is whether the hire is still right in year two.
The market measures speed because speed is measurable.
Time-to-fill is the metric everyone can agree on. It’s a clean number, it fits on a dashboard, and a lower one always looks like a win. Quality of hire is none of those things — it’s slow to observe, hard to attribute, and only fully visible long after the search team has moved on. So the whole IT hiring machine drifts toward optimising the thing it can see and calling it the thing it wanted.
That substitution is the error. Fast and good are correlated at the junior end, where roles are well-defined and the pool is deep. At the senior end they come apart. The scarce leader you actually need is not sitting in the funnel waiting to be closed in two weeks. Compressing the timeline doesn’t find them faster — it just narrows you to whoever was already available.
“Nobody celebrates a senior hire two years later, which is exactly when you find out if it was a good one. We celebrate the close, because the close is fast and visible. The market rewards the wrong moment.”
Sachith Rai · MD & Founder, Recruise
The cost of a rushed hire arrives late, with interest.
A wrong senior hire rarely detonates in the first quarter. The person is competent, the onboarding goes fine, the early wins land. The damage is slower: a bench built in their own likeness, a strategy quietly bent toward their comfort, a set of decisions that each looked reasonable and together pointed the function slightly wrong. By the time it’s undeniable, you’re two years in and unwinding not one hire but everything that hire set in motion.
That’s the true cost the time-to-fill number never captures. The two weeks you saved at the front are trivial against the eighteen months you’ll spend correcting course — and against the second search you now have to run, from a worse position, with the trust you spent the first time gone.
Measure the hire that lasts, not the one that closed.
The fix is not to be slow for its own sake — drift is its own failure. It’s to stop treating speed as the objective and start treating it as one constraint among several. The real objective is a hire that’s still right in year two: the leader who’s built the right team, made the durable calls, and grown into a mandate rather than out of one.
If you must have a single metric for senior hiring, make it retention-adjusted — not how fast you filled the seat, but whether the person is still in it and still the right person a year and a half on. That number is harder to game and it’s the only one that correlates with the outcome you were actually buying. Speed is easy. Speed that survives contact with the job is the whole point.
One pattern worth knowing, every week.
The Signal is our weekly read on the senior GCC talent market — one chart, one pattern, no noise. Written from live placement data.
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