Testimonial slider usability

I'm building a careers/recruiting landing page for a company and 1 of the things we decided should go into the page are some quotes from existing employees. My first inclination was to pull out the 3 strongest quotes and display them along with a photo of the employee in 3 grid cells all in a row, but the quotes themselves are of all different lengths (some kind of lengthy), plus they want to be able to show up to 5 or6 of them (to represent the major areas they're recruiting for), so the grid idea soon got nixed. In order to accommodate all thee quotes, at at all their different lengths, I feel like I'm stuck using a slider.

Now my main issue is how long to play each slide for. If I play each one long enough to read the longest quote, the shortest one will make you wonder if it's broken/stuck. I'm using dots below the slide area to show the total number of slides and which one is currently playing. I can also pause it on hover. AND I added a play/pause toggle to both show that it is in fact paused when hovering (or playing when not) and to allow the user to be able to play/pause it at their leisure... in case they want to ogle at the photo or linger on the words of wisdom of a certain employee.

Right now, it seems like a lot of elements (with the text, the photo, the dots and toggle button), but I think design-wise I can make it work. I'm just not sure if it's worth the time. Personally, I think there is other content on the page that belongs in a slider before these testimonials, but the requirement to accommodate up to 6 quotes (with photos) kind of has my hands tied.

Is the toggle button overkill? Maybe a tooltip on mouseenter and mouseleave displaying the status (playing or paused) would be sufficient? But then that makes it less likely that mobile users will benefit from the ability to control it. i've been thinking myself in circles... wanted to get some input from some experts.

EDIT:

The more showcases I see highlighting well designed sliders, the more manually-navigated (i.e. no autoplay, rather prev & next buttons) sliders I see. I thought I read in more than 1 place that expecting a user to click through your slider was a sure way to have content go unseen. Is this trend changing? or perhaps i am mistaken in what I thought i had learned from solid sources.

After some deliberation and looking a couple dozen more websites using sliders for roughly the same purpose, I am thinking that the best behavior is as follows:

• autoplay, previous/next buttons and dots to start with
• no toggle
• pause on hover - unpause on mouseleave
• cancel autoplay as soon as the user clicks a prev/next button or a dot

Thoughts?