When the metric improves… but the outcome doesn’t follow
In most hiring processes, there’s usually one or two thing that gets the focus. That could be:
Time-to-hire.
Cost per hire.
Number of CVs.
All useful in their own way and all easy to track.
The challenge is what happens when improving one of those becomes the goal on its own. Because that measurement can be the reason a process starts to shift in ways that aren’t always obvious at the time and aren't achieving the outcome you actually wanted.
The Cobra Effect
There’s a concept known as the “cobra effect”. It comes from a real situation where a bounty was introduced to reduce the number of cobras in a city. Instead of solving the problem, it created a new one - people started breeding cobras to claim the reward.
Yes the metric improved, but the underlying problem didn’t, in fact it got a lot worse.
How this appears in hiring
Let's look at time-to-hire. It’s a useful metric. It highlights delays and it helps teams understand how quickly roles are being filled. But when it becomes the main focus, behaviour can start to change around it. Processes get tightened, stages get reduced and decisions happen faster.
All of this can improve the metric without necessarily improving the outcome.
Metrics vs outcomes
The difference is this: A metric tells you what happened, an outcome tells you whether it worked.
So yes, you can reduce time-to-hire and still end up with:
- hires that don’t settle in to the organisation
- roles that need to be re-hired
- teams that feel the impact later
That’s where the issue appears because it was never meant to be about speed but about quality and the focused shifted to what’s being measured rather than what actually matters.
What this means in practice
This doesn’t mean speed isn’t important because in most cases, it is. But on its own, it’s not enough. What matters more is how speed is linked to whether the hire actually works and that's where changes in how a process is measured can make a big difference.
A more balanced way to approach time-to-hire
The guide below uses the time-to-hire metric to show how you can avoid the cobra effect and achieve the right outcome without getting lost in focusing on the metric of speed.
If you’re reviewing your own hiring process at the moment, it’s worth stepping back and asking: Are we improving speed…or are we improving decisions?