Hiring fast and hiring well are two different things, and the market keeps confusing them

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 2 weeks. Compressing the timeline just narrows you to whoever was already available.

The people you actually want for a VP or a Head-of seat aren’t in your pipeline. They’re three quarters into a mandate somewhere else, doing it well, and not thinking about you at all. That’s the whole problem with treating senior hiring like a throughput exercise. When you compress the timeline, all you change is the size of the circle you can draw around the people who happened to be free that month. I’ve sat with teams who closed a senior role in 3 weeks and felt sharp for it, then worked out a year later that they’d hired for availability and called it fit.

Availability and quality are close to unrelated at this level. The best operators I’ve helped place took weeks to come around to the conversation, and more weeks to leave the last job cleanly. Every one of those weeks was the search doing its job. So when a senior seat fills quickly, read it as a fact about the shortlist. It was thin, and the person at the top of it had the least reason to stay put.

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 everything that hire set in motion.

That’s the true cost the time-to-fill number never captures. The 2 weeks you saved at the front are trivial against the 18 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. And that second search is always harder. The team that got burned is warier, the budget holder is asking why the first one didn’t take, and the good candidates you passed on the first time have moved on. The bill from a rushed hire lands twice. Once on the hire itself, and again on the search that has to clean up after it.

Hiring well is mostly unglamorous discipline. It’s getting real conviction on the spec before you open the role, so the job is built around the outcome you need before anyone interesting walks through the door. It’s chasing the references the candidate didn’t hand you, the back-channel ones who’ll tell you how the last 2 years really went. And it’s holding the bar where you set it when the finalist walks in as a strong 7 and the seat needed a 9.

None of that shows up on a dashboard, which is exactly why it gets skipped. The hardest part is the politics. The business wants the chair filled. Every week the role stays open, someone senior asks why, and the pressure to say yes to a good-enough candidate builds until it feels like the responsible thing to do. Holding the line there is the job. I’ve had to talk teams out of closing a search more often than I’ve had to push them to move faster, and the ones who listened rarely regretted it.

The fix isn’t to be slow for its own sake, drift is its own failure. It’s to treat speed 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, whether the person is still in it and still the right person a year and a half on. That number only moves when you’ve done the slower work of designing an interview process that measures the right things. 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.