---
title: We Don't Want the Fastest Surgeon, Right?
description: Yes, we still need to be efficient, but like a good surgeon, I don't want speed to be the primary measure of my success in 2026+.
image: https://blog.recruitingtoolbox.com/hubfs/1793208513645.png
---
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# Recruiting Toolbox Blog
# We Don't Want the Fastest Surgeon, Right?
[John Vlastelica](https://blog.recruitingtoolbox.com/blog/author/john-vlastelica)
October 30, 2026
3 minute read
This post first appeared on John’s [Try Harder is Not a Strategy LinkedIn Newsletter.](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/we-dont-want-fastest-surgeon-right-john-vlastelica-47a4c/)
You might have heard me say this before - "Speed is the love language of hiring managers." I loved saying that, especially because our focus groups with hiring managers across 300+ companies in 20 countries reinforced how S L O W recruiting was perceived to be by many business leaders (even though they were often the reason it was slow).
Like you, I've been thinking a lot about AI and - more generally - how the value proposition for so many things is, "look how much faster we can do this thing that used to take hours - now we can do it in minutes!" And generally, as an impatient person, I almost always want things to go faster, and in capitalism, efficiency is often king, so I get why so many business leaders want to go faster.
But last week I was at an AI conference in San Francisco (not HR related) and I kept thinking about something one of the speakers said - you don't want the surgeon whose primary value and rewards are based on speed when you have something seriously wrong with you...you want the best, the highest quality surgeon, who takes the time to give you the best chance of getting it right the first time. (I immediately thought of the "measure twice, cut once" saying.) Yes, you want a surgeon who has done this same procedure a thousand times, and you want some degree of speed and efficiency, but you don't want their primary incentive to be getting through your operation faster.
**MOVING AWAY FROM SPEED AS OUR PRIMARY MEASURE OF SUCCESS**
As more of our transactional work gets automated - which will often mean the parts of the process that were slower will now be faster, like candidate scheduling and sorting - [the work that'll be left may require higher touch engagement with candidates and stakeholders](https://blog.recruitingtoolbox.com/blog/10-ideas-from-my-recruiting-brainfood-conversation-on-where-i-think-the-recruiter-role-is-headed), and take more time. This higher value work should be primarily measured and evaluated not based on speed, but by the quality it produces. Speed still matters of course - high touch and slow can be terrible at the offer stage when your top candidate has 3 competing offers to respond to by tomorrow. But as talent advisors, we need to do a little rebranding and begin to demonstrate how the value we offer isn't *primarily* about going faster through the process...it's about quality candidate evaluation, better hiring decisions, and personalized selling and candidate experience that helps the right candidates say yes.
And good news - a quality focus often leads to measurable improvements in speed. In fact, to make your funnel more efficient, to save your hiring teams time, to get the req filled faster, investing time in quality upfront kickoff meetings ([don't call it an intake!](https://recruitingtoolbox.com/stop-calling-it-an-intake/)), investing time in finding and engaging higher quality candidates, and even investing time in live hiring decision meetings can reduce rework and get us to the right hire(s) faster. (See: [It takes quality to get speed article](https://blog.recruitingtoolbox.com/blog/we-need-speed-to-get-quality) I wrote a while ago.)
But the bad news? We're often evaluated - as a function - around speed as our primary measure of value to the business. Some of that is on us - we've been addicted to time to fill metrics since the first ATSs.
**REDEFINING OUR VALUE PROPOSITION**
Our opportunity - especially as TA leaders - is to help the business and our HR boss understand that the value we create with human recruiters will likely require some reframing away from speed to quality. The steps in the recruiting process that human recruiters focus on will be the higher touch, slower pieces or the edge cases, requiring more complex diagnosis, exceptions to the rule, and more time.
Additionally, as we [segment our strategy more](https://www.unleash.ai/artificial-intelligence/opinion/will-ai-usher-in-an-era-of-inefficiency-in-recruiting) - identifying where AI/automation and hiring manager self service may be the norm for certain roles, and where a senior talent advisor doing more complex sourcing, screening, interviewing, approvals, and selling work will be required for more challenging to fill roles - it'll be critical that we teach the business leaders what kind of investments and measures of success we need to have for each piece of our strategy.
Bottom line: We shouldn’t evaluate an automated, self-service hiring model and a senior talent advisor handling complex searches using the same expectations. And as TA leaders, we need to reshape [how success is defined and evaluated for our recruiters](https://blog.recruitingtoolbox.com/blog/how-will-competencies-shift-for-recruiters-as-we-move-towards-talent-advisor-2.0), who are doing the human-to-human work of recruiting. Human recruiters will be expected to handle even more complexity and exercise even more judgment—and speed alone won’t tell us whether they did that well.
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## You might also be interested in...
#### [What We Can Do as TA Leaders When We’re Stretched Too Thin](https://blog.recruitingtoolbox.com/blog/what-we-can-do-as-ta-leaders-when-were-stretched-too-thin)
#### [What Kind of Taxes Are You Paying in Talent Acquisition?](https://blog.recruitingtoolbox.com/blog/what-kind-of-taxes-are-you-paying-in-talent-acquisition)
#### [Ready, Fire, Aim? Why Great TA Teams Pause to Aim First](https://blog.recruitingtoolbox.com/blog/ready-fire-aim)
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