She quit on day eleven
A senior hire quits in week two because the owner never decided what the role owned, then blurred the gap in interviews to close the offer.
Angle
Hiring
12 posts
The Reference Check I Stopped Skipping
Five senior hires, three reference calls done. Two flagged concerns the panel never saw. After a third failed hire, references stopped being optional.
When the CEO Should Stop Hiring
23 open roles, revenue flat two quarters. The plan was built at 60% growth and nobody paused it when growth fell to 12. Here's the trigger that would have.
Two hires failed before I blamed the job description
Two hires failed the same role in under a year. The candidates were not the problem; the spec was. Why the third hire only works after you rewrite the job.
Two Hires That Saved $2M (and the One That Cost $4M)
The two hires that mattered most last year did not produce a press release. The hire that did produce a press release nearly broke the company.
Don't Hire a Head of Sales Yet
The hire feels like the fix. It's usually the cap. Until the founder has closed ten deals on the same playbook, the Head of Sales has nothing to inherit.
Your best intern left for the competitor in week six
Booked to shadow for ten weeks, she ran the biggest launch by week four and had a competitor's offer by week six. What an optics-built internship really costs.
The first ten employees who carried the wrong values
The values were on the wall. The first ten hires lived different ones. By employee thirty, the wall version was a fiction nobody bothered to update.
The DEI metric reported without context
Twenty-eight percent. The number went into every board deck. Nobody asked what it measured, against what benchmark, or whether the trajectory was right.
The headcount plan priced at last year's salaries
The plan called for fifteen hires. The comp math came off last summer's bands. By the time offers went out, the market had moved and nobody had told the board.
Don't hire the only candidate who said yes
The role sat open four months. The pipeline was empty. You hired the one candidate who said yes. They left in nine weeks.
The senior hire everyone quietly wrote off
Twenty years of experience, six months in, still asking the same questions. The hire wasn't wrong. The onboarding was.