Employers now name the quality of a hire as their biggest hiring problem, ahead of speed and cost. Yet most of them still run the same screening process for a warehouse role as for a senior analyst. Our reading: better hires come from a process designed per type of role that reaches a sharp decision early, and speed follows from that.
A change in what employers worry about
For years the dominant hiring question was how fast a role could be filled. A 2026 survey by Aptitude Research among organisations of different sizes shows that this has changed. Quality now leads the list of hiring challenges, with speed close behind and cost after that.
Quality in this survey does not mean a neater fit on paper. It means making the right hire. Employers that rate their own hiring technology as effective report better hires, fewer interview rounds and a shorter time to hire, all at once. Those are not separate wins. A process with fewer, better-designed steps reaches a decision sooner, keeps candidates from dropping out and produces a stronger hire than a long process with extra rounds.
The same process for every role
An audit of visible hiring processes by Phenom, published in the same report, shows where practice lags. Most audited employers use identical automation for frontline roles and for knowledge work. The qualification step makes no distinction by profile.
That matters when quality is the goal, because what makes a good hire differs sharply by role. For a shift worker, availability and reliability may decide. For an engineer or a controller, depth of expertise and judgement count, and those are hard to read from a form. Knowledge work, the category most employers say they care about, scores weakest on the capabilities the audit measured.
Measurement shows the same gap. Many organisations say they track how their hiring tools perform, but fewer do so separately per role type. Only a small group runs a fully automated process from application to offer, and that group is the most likely to see the difference between roles. The rest measure the process as a whole and miss where it fails.
What this does not show
The survey sample is modest and respondents rate themselves. The audit looks only at what is publicly visible in a hiring process. Phenom sells the platform that scores well on the measured capabilities, and Aptitude Research ran the survey in partnership with it. Read the findings as a direction, not as a market estimate.
The shift itself may also be temporary. In a cooling labour market, vacancies feel less urgent and attention moves to quality on its own. Speed has not vanished as a concern: it trails quality only narrowly. If the market tightens again and speed returns to the top of the list, our reading weakens.
What you can do
- Split your hiring process by role type. Write down, per family of vacancies, the few qualities that decide a good hire, and build the screening around those.
- Cut rounds that test what an earlier round already tested. Fewer, better-prepared conversations reach a decision sooner and lose fewer candidates on the way.
- Measure quality after the hire, per role type: did the person stay, and does the manager still call it the right hire a year later? Without that, quality stays an opinion.
- Treat speed as the result of a sharper process, not as a target of its own.