Every critical hire lands on your desk and will not leave until it is done.
Four months to hire. The raise, the market entry, the product pivot, all pushed back a week at a time.
You are writing the job spec between board meetings. You are sitting in a third-round interview for a role you do not fully understand. Three people interviewed the same candidate and each saw something different, and all three are now asking what you thought.
The role was defined in twenty minutes. The questions were made up on the spot. The decision comes back to you because nobody else will own it, and nothing in the process produces a verdict without you. You are still not sure it is the right decision.
That is before anything has gone wrong.
What happens next
The chain
Nobody decides to hire the wrong person. It happens one step at a time.
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Months one to four. The hire.
01
The bottleneck.
The team brings you candidates, but nobody wants to make the final decision. When you ask whether you should hire this person, nobody answers. You make the decision yourself, based on a sixty-minute conversation and a feeling you are not sure you can trust.
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Months five to seven. Seeing it was wrong.
02
The wrong hire.
Three months later, the results are not there. One of your best people has resigned because they were doing two jobs. You are now doing the job yourself while you decide whether to give it more time. Three months to see it was wrong, and four more to find someone else. Eleven months in total.
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Months eight to eleven. Hiring again.
03
The conversation you put off.
You knew two months ago that it was not working. There was never a good moment. Now you are telling someone who tried hard that it is over, and they already knew. The team knew before you did.
Eleven months in total.
“I need this person to work out, because I do not have time to do this again.”
What is really causing it
The mistakes
Bad hires are definition failures. The interview is where you find out.
The fault is not in the people. It is in the structure, and the structure is the same in almost every company between twenty and two hundred and fifty people.
- 01
“We know what we need. Let us get some candidates in and work it out as we go.”
Starting the search before the role is clear.
The job description is written in twenty minutes and posted before anyone has agreed what success looks like after ninety days, six months or a year.
- 02
“I will know the right person when I see them.”
Treating interviews as conversations, not assessments.
The questions are made up on the spot, and everyone leaves the interview with a feeling instead of evidence.
- 03
“We all met them. Let us talk it through.”
Deciding from memory, not evidence.
The interviewers compare notes three days later, except there are no notes and nothing was scored. The person who speaks loudest wins, and the decision goes back up to you.
- 04
“We did the HR workshop. We will remember.”
Training that nobody uses.
Nobody did. Two months later every manager is hiring the way they did before.
- 05
“We have HR for that.”
Leaving it to HR.
HR can write the advert and book the interviews. HR cannot decide whether this person will deliver in your team. That decision is still made by a manager who struggles to explain what good looks like, and when it goes wrong, HR gets the blame.
- 06
“Not perfect, but not wrong either, and the alternative is starting again.”
Taking the reasonable candidate to make the problem go away.
The bar is lowered to fit the person in front of you. It feels practical. It is the decision that causes every problem that follows.
The enemy is Drift. The gap between what you defined and what you actually decided.
The Hiring Blueprint
Define what right means before you look. Everything after that is built to stop the definition drifting.
How the Blueprint stops it →Or start with one role. Book a free Audit
