When a role needs filling fast, you have three options. Keep your current process and hope. Cut rounds and cross your fingers — eight interviews to four, same method, half the evidence. Or the counter-intuitive third option, which is the one that actually works: go slow to go fast. Invest a few hours before the process starts so the process itself can sprint.
The math behind the urgency is real: high-quality candidates are on the market for roughly ten days (Workonic, as cited in Cipher, ch. 2). But the math behind the caution is bigger: a mis-hire costs about 15x salary for a mid-to-senior role (Cipher, ch. 1). Fast-and-wrong is the most expensive speed there is. The variables below decide whether speed and quality trade off — or compound.
Variable 1 — Is the role defined, or just open?
The single biggest determinant of hiring speed is invisible on any dashboard: whether the team agrees on what success in the role looks like. The iCIMS gap — 80% of recruiters confident they understand the role, 61% of hiring managers disagreeing (as cited in Cipher, ch. 2) — is where hiring time actually goes: sourcing against the wrong picture, interviewing mismatches, relitigating criteria in the debrief. A Cipher built in one working session repays itself in the first week of sourcing.
Variable 2 — Can your interviews run in parallel?
Sequential interviews are the schedule-killer, and they're sequential because nobody divided the territory. With a defined role, interviewers split the deliverables and run the same week — no repetition, no waiting for round three to book. Structure is what makes parallelism safe.
Variable 3 — How fast does evidence become a decision?
The quiet time-sink isn't interviewing; it's the gap after it. Craig's answer from the Foundations training is the same-day debrief: "You want to eliminate the time that you waste in between interviews rather than the time you spend on making a high quality decision… get back to that candidate with what the next steps are." Evidence captured live — transcripts, independent ratings — is what makes same-day possible.
Variable 4 — Does your speed show?
To the candidate, your velocity is your interest. The company that interviews Tuesday and calls Wednesday wins against the company still scheduling round two — at equal offers. Craig again: "How great did you feel that day when you did an interview, and you came back at night and the phone was ringing?"
Go slow to go fast, in practice
Half a day defining the role. Interviews structured, divided, and booked in parallel. Debrief the day they finish. Decision to the candidate inside their ten-day window. That's a process that's fast because it was designed — not fast because it skipped the design.
Hope is not a strategy. Neither is fewer interviews with the same vagueness.
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Frequently asked questions
How do you hire faster without lowering the bar?
Invest up front: define what the role must deliver, divide interview territory so rounds run in parallel, and debrief the same day. Speed comes from removing the gaps between steps, not from removing the steps.
Why does hiring take so long?
Mostly misalignment: sourcing against a role the team hasn't actually agreed on, sequential interviews that repeat each other, and decision meetings that run on memory. Each traces back to the role never being precisely defined.
How fast should you get back to candidates?
Inside days, not weeks — strong candidates are typically off the market in about ten days. A same-day debrief makes a next-day answer routine.
Sources
- iCIMS, “Best Practices Rolling Out iCIMS to Your Hiring Managers” (2020) — as cited in Cipher, ch. 2.
- “Top Recruitment Statistics for 2019.” Workonic — as cited in Cipher, ch. 2.
- della Penna, C. HireBest Foundations course — quoted verbatim from the course transcript.
- della Penna, C. Cipher: A Proven Framework to Hire the Best People. Third Act Publishers, 2026.