Why Hiring Faster Doesn’t Mean Hiring Worse - If You Change One Thing

Faster hiring doesn’t require lower standards. See how structured interviews and quality-of-hire metrics improve speed, retention, and results.

Author: Yulia Borysenko - Staff Services Director at Mobilunity

With 10+ years in IT HR leadership, Yulia leads Mobilunity’s cross-functional HR team using data-driven strategies for hiring, workforce planning, and development. She believes in marrying technical rigor with people-first practices, and these insights reflect both industry research and our hands-on experience.

In today’s hyper-competitive tech market, companies feel immense pressure to fill engineering roles quickly. But moving faster in recruitment doesn’t have to mean lowering standards - you just need to change one thing in your hiring approach. By switching from gut-based, random interviews to a structured, data-driven interview process, we can dramatically cut time-to-hire without sacrificing candidate quality.

At Mobilunity, where I lead HR with over a decade in IT recruiting, I’ve seen that a streamlined but rigorous process is the key. Developers often juggle multiple offers, and slow hiring literally costs deals. In fact, Robert Half reports nearly 90% of companies now embrace flexible or hybrid work, meaning top talent can easily move on to the next opportunity if you delay. Our experience confirms this: lengthy approval loops cost us candidates, so we compressed admin tasks (like resume screening and scheduling) while preserving the core technical and fit evaluations. The result? We hire faster and keep our standards high - because we replaced haphazard screening with a consistent, evidence-based funnel.

“Hiring in tech today is like playing a game - but which one are you playing? Chess - You plan 3 steps ahead, analyze the competition, and make strategic moves. Roulette - You spin the wheel, throw out offers, and hope for the best.”

Rushing Recruitment Can Backfire

Pressure to “just hire someone fast” often leads teams to skip important steps, but mis-hires can be hugely expensive. Research from HR Dive shows that a $60,000‐per‐year engineer who is a poor fit can end up costing around $181,000 once you add lost productivity, rework, mentor time and replacement costs. In other words, that bad hire cost 3× their salary before everyone realized they weren’t working out. In a tech project, one wrong developer can derail timelines and demoralize a team.

Even internal studies reinforce this lesson: one analysis found that adding just two targeted interview steps (for example, a coding challenge and a teamwork interview) might add two weeks to the process, but it reduces mis-hires by roughly 60%. In practice, we schedule technical assessments and culture-fit conversations in advance - this costs a few days but saves months of headache later. As Mobilunity’s recruitment team emphasizes, rigorous screening and structured evaluations flag misalignments early, so we “place far fewer engineers who later fail our projects”.

In short, skimping on quality up front almost never saves time overall. Our playbook is to ask: which parts of hiring can we speed up (like fast scheduling and quick applicant screenings), and which parts must stay solid? When a role opens, we immediately set candidates’ expectations on timeline and keep them informed. This transparency builds trust – after all, 86% of HR pros say recruiting is now like marketing for your employer brand. When candidates know what’s happening, even a slightly longer process feels fair.

The “One Thing”: Structured, Data-Driven Interviews

The single biggest change we made was to eliminate random “nice chat” interviews. Instead, we use structured interviews with clear goals and scoring rubrics. As our team’s LinkedIn post illustrates, the right approach is “Technical assessments and structured interviews” instead of “They seemed nice in the interview” hiring. In other words, we define exactly what skills and behaviors we’re measuring before we meet the candidate. Each interviewer has a checklist (technical challenge, problem-solving task, or situational question) so that every candidate is evaluated on the same criteria.

This shift had an immediate impact. For example, Svitlana Skalova, our Recruitment Lead, often reminds us that alignment between interviewers matters as much as candidate ability - everyone must ask consistent, relevant questions. By adhering to a process (say, a coding test followed by a teamwork interview), we avoid wasting time on weak fits. Industry research backs this up: structured interviews not only reduce bias, they predict job performance much more reliably than informal chats. One hiring study found that including two additional evaluation steps can cut mis-hires by ~60%. For us, those steps are often a hands-on coding challenge and a scenario Q&A on teamwork or conflict resolution.

The technical result: we still move fast (thanks to streamlined logistics), but we never “cut corners” on what matters. We may take an extra day or two to do a proper coding screen, but that pays off. As Mobilunity founder Cyril Samovskiy points out, we’ve built our reputation on deep vetting - for about 500 experts in our network, we know who can conduct interviews and how. He notes, “We heavily invest in the first of our three ‘R’s-recruitment-to compete effectively with traditional agencies… I can confidently say that in the technical field, we are among the strongest recruitment service providers”. In short, our edge is being faster at the hard parts (like thorough interviews) rather than skipping them.

Track Quality, Not Just Speed

Another key change is what we measure. Most HR teams focus only on “time-to-fill” and headcount, but we switched to quality-of-hire metrics. Recent benchmarks show that 31% of companies now rate quality-of-hire as their top ROI metric, versus only 18% focusing on speed. In other words, a fast hire who quits or underperforms is far more expensive than a bit of extra hiring lag for someone who stays and excels. We agree. At Mobilunity, our success is gauged by retention, performance and client satisfaction - not just getting a body in the seat.

For example, we track new-hire retention after 6-12 months, bug rates, and ongoing performance feedback. If we see a pattern of hire failures, we go back and adjust our interview criteria. This data-driven loop means we can safely experiment with speeding up scheduling (using tools and recruiters to move candidates through) while holding firm on core evaluation steps. If something’s off in a role, we don’t blame “speed” - we refine the selection process. As I like to say, we treat hiring as an ongoing science: constant analysis plus human judgment.

Candidate Experience Still Matters

Crucially, “hire faster” should never mean ghosting candidates or cutting off communication. Our processes are fast only because we coordinate well, not because we rush people off. Today’s engineers expect clarity: surveys show that 52% of job seekers have declined an offer simply because of a poor hiring experience. They also perceive hiring experience as a signal of your company culture - 78% of candidates say the hiring process indicates how an employer values people. So even if we take extra time on interviews, we engage candidates continuously with updates, feedback, and realistic timelines.

In practice, our recruiters treat every touchpoint as an opportunity to build our employer brand. We respond quickly to applications, use automated scheduling to avoid back-and-forth, and always debrief candidates afterward. This “candidate-first” attitude pays dividends: it keeps people in our pipeline and makes offers more attractive. One of our hiring guides bluntly warns, “It is easy to lose a worthy candidate to your competitor by simply making them wait.”. We take that seriously - even under time pressure, we never compromise courtesy and transparency.

Putting It All Together: Practical Tips

Through thousands of hires, we’ve distilled a balanced approach. Here are some of our practical takeaways:

1. Automate admin, humanize hiring. Use scheduling tools or external recruiters to move things along quickly, but reserve decision-making for people. For example, we use specialized recruiters to source candidates fast, then our core team does the in-depth interviews.
2. Structured interview checklist. Always include a technical test and a culture-fit discussion. Ask scenario-based questions (e.g. “Tell me about a time you disagreed on a technical decision - what happened?”) to see how candidates think, not just what they know. This adds only a few days to the timeline but cuts mis-hire risk dramatically.
3. Transparent communication. Set and share a clear timeline at the outset. Notify candidates of every step and decision. Studies show that when you keep applicants informed, you “strengthen your reputation” as an employer. Treat each candidate well – remember, even rejected or delayed candidates talk about your company on social media.
4. Measure outcomes, not speed. Track retention and performance of hires as your success metrics. A hire who stays and delivers great work is far more valuable than one who filled a seat in two weeks. Industry data confirms that leading companies prioritize quality-of-hire (31%) over sheer speed (18%).
5. Use data wisely. Leverage analytics in your hiring funnel. We monitor where candidates drop out, which sourcing channels yield the best fits, and use feedback surveys to spot churn risks early. If one recruiter or one job test consistently predicts good hires, we double down on it. In short, we let data guide our hiring moves.

Balancing Speed with Quality: The Result

In my 10+ years in tech HR, I’ve learned that the best solution is balance. If you only run fast, you crash; if you only check every box, you move too slow. By changing that one thing - adopting a rigorous, structured process - you get the best of both worlds. As our founder Cyril Samovskiy stresses, we’re ultimately in the people business, not the magic-hire business. We manage developers for clients, and clients for developers, ensuring all sides thrive.

At Mobilunity we demonstrate that point daily. We’ve seen that a little extra care up front saves months of pain. By combining data-driven discipline with a personal touch - structured coding tests, scenario interviews, clear communication and analytics - we speed up hiring while actually hiring better. Other tech firms can adopt the same strategy: move efficiently, but remember that great hires are worth the extra effort of a thoughtful process.

Key Takeaways:

1. Hiring quickly doesn’t mean lowering the bar - it means removing bottlenecks, not cutting corners.
2. The “one thing” to change is how you evaluate candidates: use structured, consistent interviews instead of informal gut-feel chats.
3. Always balance speed with screening. Automate scheduling, but keep coding tests and fit interviews in your pipeline.
4. Prioritize candidate experience and employer branding even under time pressure. (Most candidates will judge you on the process, not just the offer.)
5. Track quality-of-hire metrics (retention, performance) as your real success measures.

By tweaking this one aspect of our hiring method, we built faster, stronger hiring at Mobilunity - and you can too.