Strategy

Quality beats speed as top hiring problem

August 2026

5 min read

A 2026 survey of more than a hundred organisations by Aptitude Research shows that 54% name quality as the biggest hiring challenge. 45% name speed and 39% name cost. Among employers that rate their automation as effective, 42% report higher quality of hire. But 61% of the 219 audited employers apply the same automation to frontline and knowledge worker roles, with no distinction by profile type. 64% measure automation usage well, but only 60% do so consistently across role types. The shift from speed to quality changes what a client expects from an agency.

Two of the five negotiation styles pay

August 2026

5 min read

How you ask for a starting salary decides whether asking pays. In a study of 149 American professionals, published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior in 2011, those who negotiated gained an average of $5,000 over the first offer. The gains came from two of the five styles measured: competing and collaborating. Compromising and accommodating produced no measurable gain, and risk-averse participants negotiated least and were least satisfied afterwards. A $5,000 difference at the start compounds to roughly $604,000 over forty years at 5% annual raises, by our own arithmetic.