You only need to fill a position with a person that is good enough.
If you reject someone who would have been a good fit but still hire someone good eventually, that’s ok.
A bad hire is not fun, not for HR, not for the hiring manager, not for the colleagues and ultimately not for the person who got hired. Especially if they had to move for the job, possibly with family.
A bad hire has massive negative consequences for many people. Of course you want to avoid that, if that comes at the cost of not hiring someone who would have been great occasionally, that’s unfortunate but acceptable.
I don’t disagree but “good enough” comes with its own risks. That may be fine for an organization that has a lot of inertia and is biased towards the “maintaining” side of the house. However, I think it would make it make things more difficult if the intent was for bold, transformative change.
The bar for "good enough" can of course be quite high.
If you're hiring people at the very top or with rare skillsets, like building browser engines, building databases or people whose skill is at author/contributor level to relevant technology (for the job in question), you're probably not going to go with the usual process anyway as there is less uncertainty.
Fun fact: Google & other tech giants have poached a lot of game engine designers to optimise datacenters at truly obnoxious salaries, because their fundamental skill is making complex systems of interacting entities run as efficiently as possible. It's causing problems in the games industry because they can't compete.
If you reject someone who would have been a good fit but still hire someone good eventually, that’s ok.
A bad hire is not fun, not for HR, not for the hiring manager, not for the colleagues and ultimately not for the person who got hired. Especially if they had to move for the job, possibly with family.
A bad hire has massive negative consequences for many people. Of course you want to avoid that, if that comes at the cost of not hiring someone who would have been great occasionally, that’s unfortunate but acceptable.