Many so-called bad hires are not candidate failures. They are the predictable result of lazy thinking disguised as urgency before a search even begins.
When a new hire doesn’t work out, excuses and explanations arrive quickly. They interviewed well but didn’t end up delivering. They weren’t the person we thought they were. I guess they weren’t a fit for our culture. The recruiter should have found us someone better…
Sometimes those explanations are fair. People are complicated and no selection process can remove every element of risk.
This is commercially important because recruitment is not just about finding people. It is about making decisions that protect momentum, productivity and reputation. Over the years I have found that when the brief is confused or unsure, the recruitment process is already carrying significant risk before the first candidate is ever approached. Failure does not typically begin with the candidate.
It begins with the brief.
A vacancy is not a recruitment strategy
For any employer who has been around for a while, the sequence will be familiar. Someone resigns; the organisation exhales sharply, finds the previous position description, updates a few lines and starts talking about how quickly it can get an advert up.
It looks efficient, feels decisive and shows a sense of urgency and responsiveness.
But often, it is exactly the wrong thing to do.
A resignation informs you that somebody is leaving. What it doesn’t tell you is what the organisation needs next.
The previous role was shaped for another moment in time, a different structure, strategy and stage in your organisational maturity. Since then, the business may have grown, contracted, automated, diversified or totally changed direction. Responsibilities are likely to have drifted with other team members changing focus or absorbing some duties and shredding others. The title may no longer reflect the authority required, and the remuneration may bear little relationship to the expectations now attached to it.
Yet organisations routinely begin recruitment with the most obvious question: “We’re all busy, how do we replace them . . . and quickly?!”
The question a good hiring manager should be asking is, “Where are we moving to now and what do we need to build next?”
That is not semantics. It changes the entire appointment and the conversation about what is needed now.
Sometimes the job description is an organisational fossil
Position descriptions often record a list of tasks focused on how work used to be divided rather than how it should be done now.
They accumulate duties over time. A little operational responsibility is added here, a reporting requirement there, perhaps a few strategic expectations when nobody else has room for them. Eventually the document can end up describing three-quarters of several jobs and the authority of none of them.
Then a salary is attached based on what the organisation used to pay (or what it hopes it can get away with!) rather than the value and scarcity of the capability required.
That creates roles which are easy to advertise but hard to fill well:
- A supposedly operational position expected to influence at executive level.
- A “hands-on” manager carrying a transformation mandate but no real authority to change anything.
- A senior leader held accountable for outcomes without the people, budget or board alignment needed to deliver them.
- A role priced for reliable delivery but briefed for strategic reinvention.
When the market responds poorly, it is tempting to say there is a talent shortage and sometimes there is.
But sometimes the market is simply declining an incoherent proposition.
More candidates do not solve a fuzzy brief
In a softer employment market, organisations can become overconfident. A bigger applicant pool is mistaken for an easier hiring decision.
But more applications do not create more clarity. They simply produce a bigger pile of plausible people to compare against an uncertain goal. If the leadership team cannot agree what success should look like, a recruiter cannot repair that disagreement by producing a shortlist. Nor can an interview panel reliably distinguish between candidates when each panel member is quietly hiring for a different version of the job.
You cannot hire accurately for a role you cannot describe easily and honestly. And if you can’t clearly define and articulate the target, you’re never likely to be able to tell when you’ve hit it.
The salary is rarely the largest cost
The visible cost of a poor appointment is the recruitment fee, advertising, salary and perhaps the expense of running the process again and again… But the real cost is the opportunity cost leaders rarely measure until momentum has already been lost.
The larger costs are less tidy and harder to measure:
- Months of management attention spent compensating, clarifying and correcting.
- Decisions delayed while confidence in the new hire declines.
- Strong employees carrying additional weight or working around the role.
- Lost momentum on projects, clients and relationships.
- Cultural damage when expectations were unrealistic from the beginning.
- A capable person leaving bruised because they were placed into an unwinnable situation.
These costs don’t typically show up as a single line on a P&L but rather they accumulate quietly through lost time, rework, frustration and opportunity. That is why role design is not an administrative prelude to recruitment so much as a commercial and leadership decision in its own right.
Six questions worth answering before going to market
Before writing the advert, briefing a recruiter or reaching for the interview questions (last updated in 2017!), it is worth pausing long enough to answer these questions.
- Why does this role need to exist now? – What organisational problem or opportunity should this appointment address today?
- What should look different 12 to 18 months after the person starts? – Define outcomes rather than compiling tasks. What things should have improved, changed, grown, stabilised or become less dependent on others?
- What should be retained and what should be redesigned? – The departing person may have shaped the role around their own strengths, preferences and history. That does not automatically create the right template for their successor. Perhaps a good process person who has polished internal structures should be replaced with a person with a more external commercial lens.
- Do the title, authority, resources and remuneration tell the same story? – If you want executive influence, strategic transformation and accountability for major outcomes, the role must carry the mandate and credibility to match.
- What will genuinely motivate the right person? – Capability is just the base layer. The strongest appointment will also find the work meaningful, enjoy the real challenges involved and have energy for the context, not just want the job title.
- Are we ready to make a permanent appointment? – Sometimes the honest answer is no. An interim leader can stabilise operations, test assumptions and help determine the capability and structure actually required. That is not indecision. It can be considerably wiser than making a permanent mistake at speed.
Pausing is not procrastination
There is understandable pressure when an important person leaves. Work still needs to be done, teams want certainty and gaps have an awkward habit of making themselves visible.
But a short period of disciplined thinking is not dragging your heels so much as aiming your arrow before letting it fly.
The purpose of taking some time to review your needs is not to create a perfect PD document or add another layer of meaningless process. It is to make a sharper decision:
- Clarity reduces risk.
- Alignment improves performance.
- Motivation drives discretionary effort.
- Honest expectations improve retention.
Good recruitment partners, be they internal or external, should contribute before the advert exists. Their value is not limited to advertising a role and introducing candidates but rather they should test your thinking, challenge the brief, explore contradictions, provide market intelligence and say, clearly, when the proposition is unlikely to attract the person the organisation says it wants and needs.
These conversations can be uncomfortable, and sometimes need to be. A recruiter who never challenges the brief is not consulting with you or advising on best practice; they are simply taking an order. The result can be polite agreement followed by expensive failure.
Before you recruit, decide what you are building
The strongest appointments begin before the search when leaders step back from the urgency of replacement and consider the organisation’s future, the work that genuinely needs to be done and the conditions someone will need to succeed.
The most expensive hiring mistake is not always choosing the wrong candidate. Sometimes it is going to market for the ‘wrong role’ – and discovering that only after a capable person, and the organisation that hired them, have both paid the price.
Bishop Associates works with boards and senior leaders to shape roles before they go to market, test propositions against real candidate expectations and recruit people with the capability, motivation and values to create lasting impact.
About the Author
Rob Bishop is the Director of Bishop Associates, a Christchurch-based executive search and recruitment consultancy known for its values-led, people-first approach. Drawing on more than 30 years working with people, leaders and organisations, Rob and his team support boards and senior leaders through executive search, professional recruitment, interim appointments, assessment and HR advice.