Speed is a feature until it costs you the judgment
Be fast where speed is free — scheduling, decisions, calibration. Be slow where it isn’t — the assessment of the things a CV won’t show.
Draft. Figures marked like this are illustrative and pending verification against Recruise placement data & Sachith sign-off before publication.
Key takeaways
- Speed is genuinely free in the plumbing — scheduling, feedback turnaround, decision latency — and most loops waste it there.
- Speed is expensive at the point of assessment, where rushing the judgment is how you buy a bad senior hire.
- The discipline is knowing which clock you’re on — fast on process, patient on the judgment.
Most searches are slow where speed is free and fast where it isn’t.
There are two kinds of time in a search, and organisations routinely confuse them. The first is process time — the days lost to scheduling, the week a piece of feedback sits in someone’s inbox, the fortnight a decision waits for a calendar to clear. That time is pure waste. It costs nothing to remove and every day of it bleeds candidates, because a senior professional reads a slow process as a signal about how the organisation runs.
The second is judgment time — the hours it takes to actually assess whether someone fits, to run the back-channel, to sit with a reservation instead of rationalising it away. That time is not waste. It is the product. Yet under deadline pressure it’s the first thing compressed, precisely because it’s the hardest to schedule and the easiest to skip.
“Be ruthless about the calendar and patient about the call. The teams that get this backwards move fast and hire wrong.”
Sachith Rai · MD & Founder, Recruise
Spend the time you save on the decision that matters.
The move isn’t to slow down or speed up wholesale. It’s to reallocate. Collapse the process time aggressively — same-day scheduling, feedback within twenty-four hours, a decision-maker who’s actually available — and hand the hours you reclaim to the parts of the assessment that reward patience. Use the slack to do the reference call properly, to bring a reservation back for a second look, to let a working session run long enough to reveal something.
That is what fast-but-not-rushed looks like. The candidate experiences a crisp, decisive process and never sees the deliberation behind it — which is exactly right. Speed that costs you judgment isn’t speed; it’s just an earlier date on the same expensive mistake.
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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