Candidate Quality Is Often a Speed Problem

When a hiring manager says the applicants aren't as good as they used to be, what is he actually looking at? Usually not the applicants. He's looking at the few people who made it to a conversation, and that's a different group. The gap between those two groups explains a lot of what gets called a candidate quality problem.

The complaint is familiar. Hiring slows down, hiring managers say the candidates are weaker, recruiters say the pool is thinner, and the response is to spend on sourcing: more job boards, a review of sourcing strategy, a brief telling agencies to go wider. All of that assumes the right people aren't applying. I suspect that for most professional roles they are. They're just gone by the time anyone calls them.

Here's how that happens. By one estimate, the average recruiter screen takes place 6 to 9 days after someone applies. Now picture a candidate who applied to a dozen jobs that week, which AI tools have made far easier than it used to be. For that person a week is a long time. Employers with faster processes have already had them on a phone screen, maybe in front of a hiring manager. When your recruiter finally calls, they'll pick up, but their attention is elsewhere, and if another offer arrives before yours they'll probably take it, whether or not it's better.

Who is still fully available on day 8? Disproportionately, the candidates with fewer options. That's a selection effect, and almost nobody measures it. It's why a pipeline can keep producing hires who feel like a second choice. On paper they weren't. They became one because the first choices had already left.

It's easier to see with two people. Say two candidates apply on the same day. One is a strong fit, with five years of directly relevant experience, a clear progression and a well-written note. The other has two years of loosely related experience, some short stints and a templated cover letter. Your ATS scores the first one higher, and she sits at the top of the recruiter's queue.

But that queue had 180 applications in it that week. By day 7 the strong candidate has heard from a competitor that screens within 24 hours, had a structured conversation with them, and been booked for a panel interview. In your ATS she is still listed as "Application Received." The second candidate, with fewer offers and less bargaining power, is still around on day 8 and gives your recruiter full attention. So the person you actually talk to is the weaker one, and everyone concludes that the applicants are weak.

Notice that sourcing couldn't have helped here. A better job description wouldn't have, and neither would more LinkedIn Recruiter seats, because both candidates applied. What went wrong was how quickly, and in what order, you got to them, and that part is entirely in your hands. Spending more on sourcing can even make it worse, since it pours more applications into a queue that's already too slow to work.

The limit underneath all this is how many real conversations your team can have in a day. A good recruiter can manage something like 8 to 12 substantive screening calls a day, by one estimate. That number doesn't rise when applications do. Once the two drift apart you start losing quality, and you lose it in a way that looks like a sourcing problem.

What would fix it, then, is screening capacity that grows with volume, and that's what we set out to build with Asendia. Look at it from the strong candidate's side. She applies on a Wednesday evening, and before the night is over her phone rings. It's Asendia, screening for the role she just applied to. It asks about her experience, and when she mentions something worth hearing more about, it follows up the way a good recruiter would. She gets to explain herself while she's still interested in the job. By Thursday morning the recruiter has a ranked shortlist with a summary and excerpts from each conversation, and she's on it, sitting in the normal ATS pipeline with structured notes attached.

The part I care about most is what that does to the shortlist. When everyone gets a first conversation within hours, the people who come out on top are the most qualified, rather than whoever happened to still be free. For roles where the applicant pool varies a lot in quality, that's a large difference. If you want to check whether this is happening in your own funnel, application-to-screen conversion is a good place to look, and we wrote about which recruitment KPIs to track in a post-AI world with this kind of problem in mind.

Strong candidates don't hold out for the most rigorous process or the best employer brand. They go through whichever process moves fastest. So before you spend more on sourcing, I'd pull last quarter's hires and count how many days each of them waited for a first call. If you're slow, you may be hiring from the bottom half of your applicant pool and calling it a talent shortage.

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