Screening Precommitment, Candidate Quality, and Time-to-Hire: An Experimental Investigation

Personnel controls over screening job candidates play a central role in helping firms efficiently hire quality employees. Using an experiment, we examine a personnel control that requires managers to precommit to the number of candidates they will screen before making a hiring decision. We find that screening precommitment leads managers to hire higher-quality candidates but lengthens the time-to-hire, compared to a no precommitment approach. The trade-off between hiring speed and candidate quality is reflected in firm earnings, where in our setting, faster hiring under no precommitment yields higher earnings despite lower hire quality. These findings highlight the managerial tension between efficiency and effectiveness in hiring and show how precommitment influences whether managers adopt a maximizing or satisficing approach to decision-making in uncertain, time-sensitive hiring settings.