With nearly three decades in talent acquisition behind him, Harsh Raj Jain, Recruitment Head of Human Resources at Ebix Group, has watched Indian hiring evolve through boom cycles, downturns, and now the AI shift. In this article, he addressed three hiring blind spots: the trade-off between speed and quality, the shrinking shelf life of technical skills, and whether India Inc. is really hiring freshers for potential or simply for a lower bill.
The real cost of closing a role too fast
Every recruiter knows the phone call. A business head, usually polite, sometimes not, asking why a position that opened on the first of the month is still open on the twentieth. Behind that question sits a number on a dashboard called “time to fill”, and in most organisations it is the number recruiters are judged by.
I have nothing against speed. A vacancy has a real cost: work piles up on the people who stayed, a client waits, revenue leaks. But somewhere along the way we started treating time to fill as the goal instead of a signal. What actually matters is time to productivity, and the two can move in opposite directions.
Here is what pressure does to assessment, and I say this having done all of it myself at some point. The shortlist shrinks from five names to two. The second interview becomes a phone call. The reference check gets pushed to “after joining”. We start reading résumés for reasons to say yes. And the candidate who interviews well quietly beats the candidate who would have done the job well. Nobody decides to lower the bar. It lowers itself, one compressed step at a time.
The bill arrives four to six months later. A mis-hire rarely fails on day one. It shows up as a team lead spending evenings redoing work, a client escalation, or a resignation that starts the whole cycle again. Only now, the position is “urgent” for the second time, and the pressure is worse. One wrong hire made in two weeks can easily cost more than the two extra weeks would have.
So how do we balance it? A few things have worked for me:
- Agree on the non-negotiables before the search starts. Two or three things the person must have, written down with the hiring manager. When the pressure comes, negotiate on everything else, never on those.
- Keep a warm bench for roles that repeat. Most “urgent” vacancies are predictable: operations, sales, support. If you are always building a pipeline, you are rarely forced to choose between fast and right.
- Compress the process, not the judgement. Same-day interview loops, quick feedback, offer approvals that don’t sit in inboxes for a week. Most delay lives in administration, not in assessment.
- Measure what happens after joining. If the dashboard tracks 90-day and one-year retention next to time to fill, the conversation with the business changes on its own.
Sometimes the right call is to tell the business head, “Give me one more week.” That sentence is uncomfortable. It is still cheaper than the alternative.
The skills on your JD may already be past their sell-by date
Pull out a technology job description written three years ago and it often reads like a museum label. Frameworks that were in demand then are maintenance work now. With AI tools changing how code is written, tested and deployed, the shelf life of any specific technical skill keeps getting shorter.
Yet our hiring criteria move slowly. A JD is copied from the last one, a keyword filter screens for the tool the team used last year, and we hire a perfect match for a job that will look different in eighteen months. The cost stays hidden because it never shows up at the hiring stage. It shows up at the next technology shift, when the person we hired for what they knew cannot make the move to what comes next, and we go back to the market again.
I have come to believe the more useful question is not “What do you know?” but “How did you learn what you know, and how quickly?” A few ways I try to get at that:
- Ask about the last thing they taught themselves, and why. A genuinely curious person will tell you with energy, including what went wrong. Someone who learns only when the company sends them for training will struggle to answer.
- Read the shape of the career, not just the tech stack. A candidate who has moved across two or three technologies and been productive in each is showing you their learning curve. That is evidence, not a claim.
- Give a problem slightly outside their comfort zone. Not to see whether they solve it, but to watch how they handle not knowing. Do they ask questions, break it down, admit the gap? Or do they bluff?
- Probe for unlearning. Ask them to describe a way of working they had to give up. People who can let go of a familiar method are worth a great deal when the tools change underneath them.
None of this means core skills don’t matter. A developer still has to write good code today. What I suggest is a different weighting: hire for the foundation and the ability to learn, and treat the specific tool as something that can be taught in weeks. The tool will change. The habit of learning stays.
For recruiters, this also means sitting down with hiring managers over the JD itself. Ask them which skills on the current list will still matter two years from now. The answer is often revealing, and it usually makes the JD shorter.
Freshers: a long-term bet, or just a bargain buy?
If I am honest, the answer in many organisations is both, and the second reason often wins.
There is nothing wrong with cost being part of the logic. Freshers are more affordable, and any sensible workforce plan needs a healthy base of early-career talent. The problem starts when cost is the only logic. You can usually tell which one a company is doing by looking at what happens after the joining date, not at the campus presentation.
When freshers are hired for potential, there is a plan behind them: a structured first year, a manager who has time to coach, real work with honest feedback, and a visible path to the next role. When they are hired mainly to fill seats cheaply, the pattern looks different. Large batches, thin training, repetitive tasks, and pay that stays flat until the good ones leave for a modest jump elsewhere. Then the company hires another batch and calls it a talent strategy.
The irony is that the cheap version is rarely cheap. Each batch has to be recruited, onboarded and trained all over again. The ones who leave are often the most capable, because they have the most options. What remains is a team that is permanently junior, and managers who spend their time on induction rather than delivery.
There is also a responsibility here that goes beyond the balance sheet. For many young people, especially first-generation graduates from smaller towns, the first employer shapes how they see work for the rest of their lives. A first job that teaches discipline, confidence and a craft is a gift. A first job that treats them as a low-cost unit teaches a very different lesson.
A few questions I would encourage any leadership team to ask about its own early-career hiring:
- What share of the freshers we hired two years ago are still with us, and how many have been promoted?
- Who, by name, is accountable for their development?
- Is fresher pay reviewed against the market after the first year, or only at the time of hiring?
- Would we be comfortable if a fresher’s parents saw how their child’s first year was planned?
If the answers are uncomfortable, the hiring is probably about cost. That can be fixed. And the companies that fix it build something rare: people who grew up inside the organisation, understand it deeply, and choose to stay.
A closing thought
Speed, skills and cost will always pull at a recruiter from three directions. The thread running through all three answers is the same: judge a hire by what it looks like a year later, not on the day the offer is accepted. That one shift in timeframe changes how we assess, what we look for, and whom we choose to invest in.
