Years ago, I was leading Talent Acuisition for a Fortune 500, and the business came to me with an initiative they called “100 in 100.”

Our team needed to hire 100 technologists in 100 days.

When a business is growing that quickly, recruiting changes. The normal cadence goes out the window. Hiring managers need people yesterday, recruiters are carrying more openings than they should, and every unfilled position feels like it is slowing down the business.

The natural response is to move faster.

Today, AI makes that easier than it has ever been.

Recruiting teams can identify candidates faster, search larger talent pools, automate outreach, summarize resumes, schedule interviews and screen applicants at a scale that would have been difficult to imagine when I was doing corporate recruiting.

That’s a good thing.

But there’s a distinction that I think is getting lost in the conversation about AI and recruiting:

We should absolutely use technology to make recruiting faster. That doesn’t necessarily mean we should use it to make hiring decisions faster.

Those are two different things.

The Cost of Rushed Recruiting

Hypergrowth creates an enormous amount of pressure on a recruiting organization.

If a company needs 100 people, the objective can quickly become filling 100 seats. Time-to-fill starts dominating the conversation. Hiring managers lower their standards because they are short-staffed. Recruiters start measuring progress by activity and throughput.

I’ve lived through it.

The problem is that the cost of a bad hire doesn’t show up on the recruiting dashboard the day the person starts.

It shows up months later.

Maybe the person can’t perform at the level expected. Maybe the manager spends an enormous amount of time coaching someone who was never the right fit. Maybe the rest of the team picks up the slack. Maybe the employee leaves and the company starts the search all over again.

At the executive level, the consequences become much larger. A bad leadership hire can affect an entire function, derail initiatives and consume a year or more before the organization finally admits it made the wrong decision.

The recruiting process may have been fast.

The outcome wasn’t efficient.

AI Changes the Speed Equation

This is where AI creates both an opportunity and a risk.

A tremendous amount of recruiting work is administrative or research intensive. AI can eliminate some of that friction.

It can help recruiters build talent maps, identify potential candidates, compare backgrounds, organize information, prepare for interviews and communicate more efficiently. Used correctly, it gives recruiters more time to do the parts of the job that actually require judgment.

That’s where I think the opportunity is.

But there’s another side to it.

Candidates have AI too.

It has never been easier for someone to take a job description and tailor a resume to match it. Candidates can optimize keywords, rewrite accomplishments, prepare interview answers and make themselves look remarkably close to whatever an employer says it wants.

Meanwhile, employers are increasingly using technology to sort through those same applications.

So we are moving toward a strange recruiting environment where AI can help candidates become better matches for the algorithm while another algorithm determines which candidates appear to be the best matches.

That can certainly create efficiency.

I’m not convinced it always creates better hiring.

The Most Important Parts of Recruiting Are Still Human

The best recruiters I’ve worked with have always done something that is difficult to automate.

They understand context.

They know that two people with nearly identical resumes may be completely different candidates. They know why someone succeeded in one organization and may struggle in another. They understand the difference between having participated in a transformation and actually leading one.

And they ask questions that don’t always fit neatly into a scorecard.

Why did this person leave?

What was really happening inside the company?

Who did they report to?

What did they inherit?

What did they actually change?

How sophisticated was the organization?

How large was the team?

Would this person work for this CEO?

Those questions become even more important as the position becomes more senior.

A CHRO search isn’t a keyword-matching exercise.

Neither is hiring a plant HR leader, a compensation executive or a senior HR business partner.

The resume gets someone into the conversation. The conversation is where you begin to understand the candidate.

Speed Still Matters

None of this is an argument for slow recruiting.

Good candidates don’t sit around forever, and cumbersome hiring processes lose people. Five rounds of interviews spread over six weeks isn’t rigor. Often it’s just indecision.

There are plenty of places where recruiting processes should move faster.

But speed and haste aren’t the same thing.

AI gives companies an opportunity to remove unnecessary delays without removing the judgment that protects them from bad hires.

That distinction matters.

Looking back at “100 in 100,” I can only imagine what we could have done with the recruiting technology available today. We could have identified people faster, communicated faster and moved candidates through the process more efficiently.

We probably could have hired 100 people faster than we did.

But I’m not sure hiring them faster would have been the right goal.

The goal was to hire 100 good people.

That’s still the goal today.

AI can solve a lot of the speed problem in recruiting.

It can’t solve the judgment problem.

And particularly in hypergrowth, confusing the two can get expensive.

Planning an HR leadership hire?

HR Search Co. partners with CEOs, private equity-backed companies, and CHROs to recruit exceptional HR leaders nationwide. If you’re planning a confidential search – or simply want to compare notes on the market -we’d welcome the conversation.