Efficiency is a delicate dance. It takes balance, compromise, and vision. Though it’s crucial for businesses to strive towards efficiency, overprioritizing it—especially in hiring—can turn costly fast. While aggressively pursuing efficiency and cost-saving strategies, organizations have been shown to experience diminishing returns, increased turnover, and compromised quality. What organizations should pursue is not efficiency, but effectiveness.
Efficiency is for show, effectiveness is for tell. Picture two workers, Roger and Amy, each assigned to build a wall. Roger is efficient. He builds his wall quickly, laying brick after brick, nearly completing his work by midday. But after a little while, his wall starts to show cracks because he didn't take the time to align the bricks properly or use enough mortar. Amy on the other hand is effective. She is measured and careful with her wall, ensuring that it’s perfectly aligned. After a couple of days, Amy’s wall is complete and built to last.
You can be efficient and you can be effective, but you can’t sacrifice one for the other. The goal is to find the optimal point of efficiency to achieve long-term effectiveness in hiring practices.
Sometimes the cheapest options turn into the costliest. This is true for clothes, furniture, cars, and even six-dollar burritos—but it is especially true in hiring. When we prioritize short-term gains and hire the easiest option, it usually ends up biting us later.
In the short-term, choosing the frugal option might seem like a win: you saved money, filled a seat, and kept the hiring process lean, but as time passes, cracks start to show. That “ideal” candidate might lack the necessary hard skills to be productive. They might not mesh with the organization’s culture. What you end up with, in return for the convenient option, is poor performance, disengagement, and even turnover.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the average cost per hire is $4,700. I came across a figure stating that the total costs per hire can amount to over 200% of that employee's salary. To me this seemed like an abstract claim, but considering the direct expenses—background checks, applicant tracking software, and recruitment agency fees—as well as the indirect costs—time spent by managers and HR staff reviewing applications, conducting interviews, and onboarding staff—it adds up. If you hire poorly, there is the added cost of replacing that employee, combined with the lost productivity, training expenses, and potential damage to team morale.
Beyond these costs, there are hidden ripple effects of a bad hire that go deeper than what’s on paper. They include delays in project timelines, strained relationships with customers and clients, and a diminished reputation. What’s even more scary is the harm it can do to a team internally, causing low morale and disengagement, which costs companies $3,400 for every $10,000 the average disengaged employee earns each year. Most companies also fail to account for the cost of unrealized revenue arising from the lost productivity and delays. Ultimately, what seemed to be a cost-effective decision becomes a drain on both finances and company culture.
Imagine that you and your friend Joe run a marathon. Joe comes out of the gate hot, running six-minute miles. He’s on fire. But after about five miles, out of breath, heaving, and nauseous, he fades and ends up finishing the race in six hours. You, on the other hand, pace yourself from the start, running a strategic eight-minute mile. You finish the race in four hours. Was Joe faster? In the beginning, sure. But in the end, he was riding your coattails.
This is the same fallacy that companies fall into when it comes to their hiring. Companies today are so obsessed with placing somebody quick, they end up acting like Joe—hiring fast, but then burning out. They end up spending an excess of time and resources trying to make the wrong choice work. It’s like Joe trying to salvage the race after his idiotic sprint. You can hire quickly but do it the right way. Don’t scrape the bottom of the barrel just to fill a seat. If you follow a strategic, thoughtful approach, you will get to the finish line faster and in much better shape.
Staffing companies are in part to blame for companies hiring poorly and fast. We have heard from several clients that their experience with other staffing companies has consisted of being bombarded with floods of candidates that often miss the mark. Most think that the job is to find someone fast, but that’s only half the battle.
At MatchPoint, the practice that we preach is finding the right people at the right time. Our approach hinges on finding the equilibrium between efficiency and effectiveness for each hire and client. Once we understand the personality, values, and unique needs of our clients, we can tailor our search to ensure that we present candidates that don’t just fit on paper—they fit on the team.
Staffing companies shouldn’t be flooding their clients with options. Instead, they should focus on quality over quantity and provide the best talent possible for the role and culture. Of course, adjustments will be needed, but a good staffing company should be quick on their feet and be able to course correct.
At a happy hour meeting not long ago, a client of ours shared what had bothered him so much about other staffing companies he used in the past:
“It felt like they were scraping the bottom of the barrel and giving us anyone they could find off of LinkedIn.”
At the end of the day, true efficiency isn’t about speed—it’s about getting to the best possible outcome the right way.