In our second year we opened a role because we could, not because we had to. Revenue was growing. The board deck looked healthy. Everyone we admired was hiring ahead of demand. So we posted a job, ran a process, and brought someone good onto a team that did not yet have enough real work to absorb them.
What followed was not a disaster. It was something harder to see: a slow drag that took two quarters to name and another quarter to fix.
This is the story of that hire and the litmus test we use now before opening any new role.
The candidate was strong — experienced, motivated, genuinely skilled. They interviewed well and the team was enthusiastic. We had budget approval and a vague sense that a bottleneck was forming somewhere in operations. We figured: get someone ramped now so they're ready when the bottleneck arrives.
That logic sounds responsible. It is the logic of almost every premature hire.
The problem was not the person. The problem was that the role had no edges. We had a title and a reporting line but not a clear set of decisions this person would own, a backlog of work waiting for them, or a way to measure whether the role was succeeding.
None of these showed up in a weekly standup. All of them showed up eventually.
Role ambiguity spread. When a new person joins and the scope of their job is fuzzy, the fuzziness doesn't stay contained. Existing team members start second-guessing which decisions are still theirs. Small conversations that used to take five minutes now require a meeting because nobody is sure who owns the outcome. The new hire isn't causing the confusion — the missing definition is.
Process arrived before it was earned. The new hire, understandably wanting to contribute, started building structure: templates, review steps, approval flows. Some of it was genuinely good practice — but for a later stage. We still needed speed and short feedback loops. The process felt productive in the moment and only later revealed itself as friction. Ripping it back out meant an awkward conversation that was nobody's fault.
Culture debt compounded. The new person could feel the ambiguity. They asked good questions we didn't have answers to. Morale dipped — not dramatically, but consistently. The kind of dip that shows up as longer Slack response times and fewer volunteers for ambiguous projects. By the time we named it, the debt had been accruing for months.
Looking back, the signal was obvious: we could not point to a specific, repeated pain that this role would eliminate. We had a theory about a future bottleneck, but no data showing the bottleneck was real today.
The difference matters. When you hire into active, measurable pain — a queue that's growing, a response time that's slipping, a person working unsustainable hours on defined tasks — the new hire walks into clear expectations. The work is waiting. The team knows exactly what changes when the role is filled. Onboarding has gravity.
When you hire into a forecast, the new person has to generate their own purpose. That is an unfair ask, and it is the company's failure, not theirs.
Before we open any role, we require honest answers to three questions:
1. Can you describe the pain in a sentence without using the word "strategy"? If the answer is "we need someone to own our strategy for X," the role isn't ready. If the answer is "our customers wait three days for onboarding because nobody has capacity to run it faster," the role is ready.
2. Is someone already doing this work badly or unsustainably? A good hire replaces duct tape with durable material. If no one is doing the work yet — if it's purely aspirational — you're hiring into a hypothesis.
3. Will this person have a full plate on day 30 without inventing work? Not day 90. Not "once we land that next contract." Day 30. If the backlog isn't already there, the role is early.
Three yeses and we write the job post. Anything less and we wait. Waiting isn't comfortable, but it's cheaper than the invisible drag of a role that doesn't fit yet.
We lost a good person over this. Not immediately — but the ambiguity eroded their confidence in us, and eventually they left for a company where the job was well-defined. They were right to leave. We had put them in a position where success wasn't clearly possible, and that is a leadership failure.
The money we spent on recruiting, onboarding, and backfilling was real. But the harder cost was the months of diluted focus across a team that had been sharp before.
Headcount growth feels like progress. It shows up in investor updates and team photos. But a role without defined work is not growth — it's overhead dressed as ambition.
The best time to hire is when the pain of not hiring is already measurable. When someone on your team can point to the specific work not getting done, the specific customers waiting, the specific quality slipping. That clarity is a gift to the person you bring on. It means they can succeed.
Budget approval is a necessary condition for hiring. It is nowhere near a sufficient one.
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