Faster. Cheaper. Better. Pick Two.

Two out of three ain't bad (until you're the one living with the hiring decision).

I've placed hundreds of finance people over the years, temporary and permanent, and there's a moment in almost every briefing where the same quiet negotiation happens. Speed, cost, quality - you get two. Which one are you giving up?

Faster. Cheaper. Better. Pick Two

For most SMEs that was never really a choice. The budget gets set, the deadline is whatever's left of the notice period, and quality becomes the thing that silently absorbs the difference.

The trade-off was never a myth (it was a maths problem).

Working through 400 applications properly costs about a week of someone's time. So it didn't get done properly. Every shortcut after that - the shallow screen, the reference nobody chased, the third candidate you never met - was the cost of that week turning up somewhere else, usually six months later.

Speed used to cost you quality (now it mostly costs you nothing).

A $6m member services business lost its Financial Controller on four weeks' notice, six weeks before the annual audit. An interim was in the seat in nine days, a fully-assessed best-fit permanent hire signed inside four weeks. Two years ago that's two separate processes, two fees and a very nervous September. Today, it’s seamless single value-led process.

Cheap used to mean compromise (now it often means re-cutting the role).

A fast-growing $2m e-commerce business was paying for a part-time bookkeeper and getting no forecasting for it. We didn't just fill the role, we split it - transactional work as automated as possible, plus six days a month of a commercially-minded +CFO-level to interpret the data. Today, that visibility costs way less than employing someone directly.

Quality was always about specificity (and specificity used to be luck).

A $15m refrigeration company had a 14-day month-end close that was always a little bit 'off'. The fix wasn't software. It was a management accountant who had transformed that exact EOM process in two previous roles. Finding that one person used to be a happy accident. Today, there are signals that can be relied upon, you just need to know how to read them.

In a future post I'll share the four questions I'd want answered before anyone briefs me on a finance hire so that all options can be presented - faster, cheaper, better. There’s seriously never a better time to be looking for the person who’s looking for you.

The bigger picture matters: the sift was always noise, the conversation was always the signal. What's changed is how much of your money and your calendar gets burned on the noise before you ever reach the signal.

There's a lot of talk about AI recruitment platforms flattening people into keywords, and some of that is fair. But done right, the tech takes the grunt work, not the judgement - and the judgement is the whole job. Knowing what 'good' looks like in a $4m business is not a shrunken-down version of what good looks like at $40m. It’s an SME's own version of great.