AI will speed up your hiring. Whether that helps depends entirely on which part you speed up. Accelerate the wrong stage and you damage your brand and your decisions at the same time.
The pitch is everywhere: AI shrinks your timeline. True. It is also the least interesting thing AI does, because speed is neutral. It makes a good process faster and a bad process faster.
The industry sells velocity as the win. It is not. The win is being right more often, faster. Different goals.
So the real question is not “will it be faster.” It is “faster at what.”
Speed in the right placeDo this
One thing is almost always worth accelerating: how quickly you respond to the human waiting on you. And it is not a soft metric. It moves offers.
In CareerPlug's 2024 Candidate Experience Report, 26% of job seekers said they rejected an offer because of poor communication or unclear expectations during a drawn-out process. Another 36% declined an offer after a negative interaction during the interview itself. These are not marginal applicants. They are people who already wanted the job and walked because of how the process felt.
Treat every candidate as if you wanted to expedite them. Quick replies, tight scheduling, no dead air. That is speed worth every dollar of automation, because the alternative is losing the people you already convinced.
Speed in the wrong placeAvoid this
Now the inverse. The most common speed mistake is the async one-way video interview, where candidates record answers to a screen and a human reviews them later, if at all.
It feels efficient. The research on how candidates react is consistent and unkind. Applicants rate asynchronous video interviews as less fair than live ones, and bolting an automated score on top lowers their sense of procedural justice and fair treatment further, which in turn erodes how attractive they find the company and whether they would recommend it (Falls et al., 2025).
It gets worse when the machine decides. A 2025 study in the Nature-portfolio journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications found that an AI-enabled interview format reduces candidates' intention to apply at all, precisely because it lowers perceived procedural justice and organizational attractiveness. And work on emotion-AI interview tools, presented at the 2025 ACM FAccT conference, found job seekers experience them as inaccurate, identity-biased, and opaque, a trifecta of perceived injustice.
So the efficient-looking shortcut taxes your brand at the candidate's very first touch. The people with options feel it and walk. You did not save time. You filtered out your best candidates and kept the ones with nowhere better to go.
Keep a human on the decision
There is a consistent thread across this research: people judge a process as fairer when a human stays in the loop than when an AI decides alone. A two-study experiment on AI interviews found human-in-the-loop decisions were perceived as fairer than AI-only ones, and, tellingly, that piling on AI interactivity or over-explaining the algorithm can actually backfire and lower perceived fairness (Shaping the fairness journey, 2025).
The lesson is not “more automation, more transparency, more speed.” It is: automate the waiting, keep the human on the judgment.
So, does AI speed up hiring?
Yes. Point it at the candidate experience and it makes you faster and more human. Point it at the decision and it should support a human, not replace one.
The teams that win do not ask AI to hire faster. They ask it to respond faster and decide better.
Run the candidate clock fast and the decision clock right. Confeti captures every interview, turns it into structured evidence, and gives the team a decision packet a human can act on.
See how it worksCommon questions
Does AI actually make hiring faster?+
Yes, mostly in scheduling, screening, note-taking, and communication. It removes coordination delay. It does not by itself make the hiring decision better.
Is faster hiring always better?+
No. Faster candidate communication is almost always better. Faster decisions are only better if decision quality holds. Speed that comes from skipping human judgment costs you later.
Can a slow or cold process really cost offers?+
Yes. In CareerPlug's 2024 report, 26% of candidates rejected offers over poor communication and 36% declined after a negative interview interaction, people who already wanted the job.
Are one-way video interviews a good idea?+
Research (Falls et al., 2025) shows candidates rate asynchronous video interviews as less fair than live ones, and an automated score lowers perceived fairness further. AI-only formats even reduce intention to apply.
Should AI make the hiring decision?+
No. Candidates consistently perceive human-in-the-loop decisions as fairer than AI-only ones. Automate the waiting; keep the human on the judgment.
References
- CareerPlug, 2024 Candidate Experience Report. link
- Falls et al. (2025). The Impact of Explanations on Applicant Reactions to Automated Asynchronous Video Interviews. International Journal of Selection and Assessment. link
- Why might AI-enabled interviews reduce candidates' job application intention? (2025). Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Nature portfolio). link
- Shaping the fairness journey: AI literacy, explanation, and interpersonal interaction in AI interviews (2025). ScienceDirect. link
- Emotion AI in Job Interviews: Injustice, Emotional Labor, Identity, and Privacy (2025). Proceedings of the ACM FAccT Conference. link