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.
Angle
Hiring
8 posts
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.