You Didn't Hire Wrong. You Hired too Fast.

If you've ever had to let someone go and your first thought was “but who's going to do the work,” this is for you.

Yes you, the founder.  You, the leader of that small businesses and startups who is doing too much, moving too fast – you are making hiring decisions you’ll spend the next year cleaning up.

Here's how it usually goes

The work is piling up. You’re either doing the work yourself on top of all the other things you have to do or your team is stretched.  You decide to post a job and almost immediately, someone comes in with the perfect resume, they interview well and boom they’re hired.

Great.  Cut to…six months later. Something is very wrong. You notice that they can't actually do what their resume said they could. The rest of the team is quietly frustrated. And, you are back to doing their job on top of yours again. You can’t make a move because the question in the back of your head is: if I let this person go, who's going to do the work?

So, you wait. You manage around it. You hope it gets better.

It doesn't get better.

Eventually you have to call someone like me, either to help you figure out how to give them feedback to make them better or to help you figure out how to part ways with them carefully. I had a client go through exactly this. The person they hired had a great resume, interviewed well, and then could not do the job. Turned out they didn't have the experience they claimed did. By the time my client called me, they'd already waited too long, the situation had become a legal question, and they ended up paying severance to someone who lied to get hired.

That's the real cost of hiring too fast.

The problem starts before the job posting

Most founders hire under pressure and then focus on technical skills. Can they do this work? Have they done it before? Do I feel comfortable handing this part of my business off to this person? Those are good, reasonable questions to ask. They're just not the only ones you should ask.

And sometimes they hire someone because "I just vibed with this person in the interview." I’m not sure you should be looking for friends in your hiring pool.

What most folks never stop to define is what the right person actually looks like beyond the resume. What qualities are important in their organizations. What are the behaviors that matter? What does success look like in this role twelve months from now? How do they respond when there’s a conflict? They don't know what good looks like until they're watching someone fall short of it.

You can't hire the right people if you don't know what you want or who you are.

This is the part nobody wants to do because it takes time they don't have.

Most companies have values. They live on your website or maybe in the handbook. What most companies don't have is a translation of those values into actual behaviors. What does “accountability” look like to you? What does it look like on a Friday afternoon when something goes wrong? How does your ideal employee behave when no one is looking?

If you can't answer those questions, you can't interview for those behaviors. And if you're only asking about skills, you will keep getting people who can do the work on paper and don't fit the organization in practice.

You Have a List of Tasks, Not A JOb Description

Most people don't start a job search by getting clear on what they need. They start by taking their loose idea of the job, searching Google for the job title and pulling language that describes the tasks from another company's posting.  The more tech savvy folks will run it through AI to clean it up and out comes something that looks like a job description.

If that’s you, what you actually have is a list of tasks with no outcomes attached. No picture of the person who would be successful and no definition of what good looks like in that role six months in. You haven't done the work of figuring out what behaviors matter, what the ideal candidate actually needs to bring, or what success is supposed to look like before you start interviewing.

So, when that person doesn't work out, the job description doesn't get rewritten from scratch. It gets anchored to whoever just left. The next search gets built around the qualities that person had, or more often than not, the qualities they lacked. You're not looking for the right person anymore. You're looking for someone who isn't the last person. That's a different thing entirely, and it still doesn't get you closer to what you actually need.

Hire slow. Fire fast.

That's the mantra, I share with every single client.

I had a client who wanted to move fast on a hire. I told him to wait to let more candidates come into the pool. He didn’t want to hear that, so he ended our engagement. The person he was most excited about had a great resume but was not remotely qualified from a skills or behavioral standpoint.

As you well know, the best candidates probably aren't on LinkedIn. They're not scrolling job boards. So, if your strategy is to post and pray, you're already working in a shallow talent pool. You may not have time to build a full sourcing strategy. But you can slow down, just a bit. At minimum, you can get clear on who you need before you start interviewing.

It’s also important that you focus on competencies when you are interviewing, not just the technical skills. You can almost always train someone on a technical skill, but you cannot train them into having the right behaviors for your organization.

Before you open the next role

Stop. Define what success looks like in ninety days. In six months. In twelve. Write down the behaviors that matter, not just the tasks. How do they need to show up?

Know who you are as a company before you go looking for someone to join it.  Include that in your job posting. Ask interview questions designed to understand how they exhibit those behaviors.

The cost of getting it wrong more than just managing around a bad employee. Sometimes it's months of lost momentum. Sometimes it's the very thing that’s holding you back when you need to be charging ahead.

Slow down once. Up front. It’ll cost you less than the alternative.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the biggest recruiting mistake small businesses make? Moving too fast. Most small business owners often hire under pressure, focus almost entirely on technical skills, and pick the best of whoever applied rather than the right person for the role. The cost of that decision shows up months later in conflict, underperformance, and turnover.

How do I know if I'm hiring the right person for my company? Start by knowing what the right person actually looks like before you open the role. That means translating your values into specific behaviors and building your interview questions around those behaviors, not just the tasks in the job description.

What does "hire slow, fire fast" mean? It means taking the time upfront to find the right person rather than filling a seat quickly, and not waiting too long once you know someone isn't working out. Most founders do the opposite. They rush the hire and delay the exit, and both decisions are costly.

Why do small companies struggle with recruiting more than larger ones? One wrong hire hits differently at a company of ten or twenty people. There's no organizational cushion. That person's impact, good or bad, is felt immediately and across the whole team.