Why hiring keeps failing,
and where it actually starts.

When a hire fails, everyone examines the wrong stage.

A senior hire doesn't work out, and the review begins. The agency is questioned and the market is blamed. The candidate is remembered as someone who interviewed better than they performed. Every account of the failure examines the last few months of the process, because that's where the failure became visible. Where it became visible and where it began are different places.

The search is never where hiring problems start. A search, whether run inside the business or by an agency, executes a definition of success it was handed at the outset. When that definition was never actually made, the quality of the execution stops mattering, and a disciplined process pointed at an undefined target fails with great efficiency. Teams asking why they keep making bad hires are usually asking the right question of the wrong stage. Repeated failure is a property of a system, and a system fails at its inputs long before it fails at its outputs.

Most roles are advertised before they're defined.

The most consequential document in most hiring processes was never written. The ad is adapted from the last ad. The position description lists duties and reporting lines and says nothing about what the person must have achieved by month 12 for the hire to count as a success. Ask the hiring manager and their manager, separately, what the role exists to do, and the answers won't match. Nobody notices, because nobody asks separately.

This happens for an unglamorous reason. A vacancy is usually opened under pressure, and pressure rewards motion. Writing a real brief feels like delay, so the role goes to market on a paragraph of borrowed language and the definition of the job is deferred to the interviews, which is the most expensive place to hold that conversation. Everything downstream inherits the vagueness. Sourcing casts a wide net because nobody can describe a narrow one, and the interviews turn into an audition for general impressiveness, because there's nothing specific to test.

None of this is a competence problem. The people involved are usually experienced and busy, and every shortcut is individually defensible. The brief that never got written is a coordination failure, and coordination failures belong to nobody, which is exactly why they persist.

A split panel is a measurement problem.

Three interviewers meet the same candidate and return 3 verdicts. Most businesses read this as healthy, a diversity of perspective doing its job. It's a measurement problem. Three people have scored one candidate against 3 private standards, none of them written down, and the debrief becomes a negotiation between impressions in which the most senior impression usually wins. Whatever that meeting produces, it's a compromise between interviewers, and the role itself never got a vote. An agreed standard, written before the first interview, is the only thing that turns a panel into an instrument.

The same defect explains the mis-hire that puzzles everyone afterwards. Look closely at most failed senior hires and you find a person who did roughly what the process asked. They matched the ad and impressed the panel. The references checked out. The selection machinery worked. It was aimed at the wrong target, because the target was never set. This is why replacing the person while keeping the process tends to produce a familiar result 18 months later, and why the honest question after a mis-hire is about the brief and the standard before it's about the individual.

The role that keeps reposting is a verdict on the system.

Every operator has seen the role that won't close. Open for months, reposted with a reworded title and a nudged salary band, and still the shortlist is thin. The explanations on offer are external ones: the market is tight, candidates want too much. Sometimes that's true. More often the role has no owner and the brief has drifted, and the repost is the system quietly grading its own work.

Drift works like this. Each interview round produces feedback, each piece of feedback quietly amends what good looks like, and after 3 rounds the panel is hiring for a different role than the one advertised, without anyone having decided to change it. Ownership, meanwhile, is spread so thin it's absent. The hiring manager believes the recruiter is driving. The recruiter believes the manager is deciding. Feedback sits in inboxes for a week at a time, and the strongest candidates accept other offers while a fourth conversation is being scheduled. None of this appears in any report, because each person can only see their own stage of the process.

Every business runs two hiring processes.

There's the process leadership describes, with named stages and agreed standards, and there's the process that actually runs, with briefs written after the ad and standards improvised one interviewer at a time. The distance between the two is where the money leaks. It's the origin of the reposted role and the quiet 18-month exit, and it stays invisible from inside, because every stage looks reasonable up close and nobody is positioned to see the whole.

So that distance is where I start, before any question of sourcing or search. I ask the people who touch hiring, a leader, a hiring manager, whoever runs talent today and a recent hire, the same questions about how a role goes from open to filled. I score what they tell me and put a cost on each finding. Where their answers disagree is one more signal. It's deliberately an audit, not a plan: until you know where hiring actually fails in your business, every fix is a guess aimed downstream of the problem.

The argument, stage by stage: it's a process problem Read a sample report