What if I told you that focusing on hiring accuracy will produce 20-50 times more ROI than focusing on hiring efficiency ever could? Read on...

Reason 1: If you hire wrong the first time, it doesn’t matter how ‘efficient’ you were, because you’re going to have to do it again. An inefficient hiring process looks a bit like this graph, with the length of the bar representing the time it takes to fill an open role, with all the consumed resources that come along with that. Time Spent Hiring Improving hiring efficiency means less time and resources go into each hiring decision, resulting in something that looks like this. Time Spent Hiring At first glance, you might say, ‘Great--improving hiring efficiency should be our number one priority when it comes to hiring, right?' WRONG. If a restaurant gets a customer’s order wrong, it doesn’t matter how efficient they were at making the wrong order. They’re going to have to do it again. The same is true for hiring. If you get it wrong, you’re going to have to do it again. Now let’s consider what happens to those ‘hiring efficiency’ gains when that happens: Time Spent Hiring Note that not only are 100% of the gains from hiring efficiency erased; the company is actually worse off for having hired “efficiently” if it’s at the expense of accuracy. If you’re efficient, but not accurate, ALL gains from efficiency will be offset (likely 3-5x) from having to do it over again.

Reason 2: Hiring efficiency delivers no more value after the hire is made; hiring accuracy continues to deliver value as long as that person is employed at your company – and usually longer. You'll find a good analogy for this in marriage. No one looks back at the end of their life and says, ‘I wish I’d gotten married after 9 months of dating, instead of 11.” When taking everything into account, it's marriage accuracy – not efficiency - that matters most because of the greater impact who you marry has on your life. The same principle is true for hiring. For this second reason, hiring accuracy beats hiring efficiency not because of what happens during the hiring process, but what happens after. Good hires and bad hires create very different amounts of value for your company, as illustrated in the chart below.