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.
Say a founder, call him Marcus, keeps a head-of-marketing seat open for four months and interviews 43 people. None land. By month four his patience is gone, the board keeps asking about the search, and the pipeline coughs up one candidate who says yes. Plausible on paper. He makes the offer.
She's gone in nine weeks. The seat is open again, now with a worse reputation in the market and a team that's lost two months of momentum to a decision everyone quietly knew, on offer day, was probably wrong.
This is the most expensive hiring mistake a company makes, and careful founders make it constantly. The cause isn't bad judgment. It's duress. The seat's been empty long enough that leaving it open feels huge and immediate, while filling it badly feels distant and abstract. The math is backwards. An empty seat recovers in weeks. A bad senior hire is a nine-month tax: the original opening, the team rebuild, the second search, the morale hit of a visible departure.
The bar drops quietly. Month one, the panel rejects someone for a clear reason. Month three, it debates whether that reason disqualifies at all. Month four, it rationalizes around it. Nobody voted to lower the bar. It sank on its own, a notch a month, against a pool that never improved, the same drift behind the culture-fit hire that broke the team.
The version that holds is inconvenient and emotionally hard. Keep the bar where it was. Accept the seat might stay open another quarter. Use the time to redistribute the work, narrow the scope, or hire a level down with a real growth plan, not a rushed bet that turns into a senior hire who can't ramp.
The board is part of the duress. "How's the search going" is the most draining question a founder gets, because the truthful reply, slowly, and slow is correct, sounds like failure. The founder who can defend the slowness saves the hire. The one who absorbs the pressure hires the wrong person and explains it in the next board update.
The hire you make out of exhaustion is rarely the hire you want. Invert it: the right hire is the one you'd still make if the seat weren't open. Hold the bar. A seat that survives another month is cheaper than a hire that survives nine weeks.