Guest post: The right person at the right time doesn’t exist.
Hiring is one of the most important things you'll do, getting it wrong can lead to some bad consequences, getting it right requires long-term thinking about business strategy.
One of my favourite dudes in the world, Phil Bird, runs his own email newsletter here. He posted this a while back and I thought it was good (and relevant!) enough for the audience of this newsletter, so Phil agreed I could re-post it here. If you enjoy it, please subscribe to his newsletter!
This title could underpin a blog post about either work or life, but as promised, when I last sneezed out a collection of words and bundled it up for the internet, this is about work.
Hiring.
The lessons in hiring are hard-won. This is a function of “the human in the loop”; the wrong hire can cause all kinds of discombobulations across the broad strata of a company, not least when you must make the hard call to let someone go.
I’ve never got comfortable with having to “let someone go”, which is a polite way of saying you’re ejecting unwanted human capital back into the labour market. If ever you do get comfortable with sitting across a table with another person and radically altering the course of their life, then it’s probably time to hang up your own spurs and do some work on yourself.
The outcome of a wrong hire is in sharp relief, but let’s look at how to avoid those tough situations which keep you up at night.
You will never find the right person for a role at precisely the right time. The attributes which make the right person is geared, amongst other things, to the unique journey of a business as it grows; what it needs at any given time can vary wildly.
When you’re a small business that can be fed with two or three pizzas, you will value the enthusiastic generalist who can turn her or his hand to any task with cheerful briskness.
I’ve never got comfortable with having to “let someone go”, which is a polite way of saying you’re ejecting unwanted human capital back into the labour market
As you grow, finding people who are more specialised and who want to focus on where they can do their best work becomes more important.
There’s a whole smorgasbord of other things which come into play, but if you have ever hired someone, you’ll have a good feel for where I’m going.
Now comes the hard part: when you find you need to add someone to the team, more often than not, it’s difficult to predict unless you sit in a very structured corporation whose budget allows the flexibility to plan a year or more ahead, unconcerned by macro trends or sharp movements in supply or demand.
Just-in-time hiring, then, is the flavour of the day. You’re filling a need which has become somewhat urgent. I would argue this is probably the right way to hire to keep things lean and streamlined. Having underutilised staff overloads the dingy with unnecessary communication and processes.
During the hiring process, there’s a temptation to settle for someone who is “good enough”. You’re probably time-poor yourself, or people in the team are under pressure, and endless interviews seem like a distraction no one needs right now.
Reading CVs, weeding out folk who over-embellish, screening for emotional intelligence, getting comfortable about expertise and experience. It’s exhausting and, dare I say it, a little repetitive after a while.
You can’t and shouldn’t ever settle for good enough. People make your business
Putting all these things together, you start to feel like the right person, with the right skills and outlook, just isn’t available in your geography, at your price point, at this juncture in time.
This is precisely the time you need to double down. This is where rubber meets road, and the future, be it a roaring success or a car crash, is predestined.
You can’t and shouldn’t ever settle for good enough. People make your business, people contribute to culture, and their verve and excitement to get things done and make progress possible.
It’s taken me many, many, years to understand this fully. I’ve made mistakes, I’ve learned from watching other people build teams.
The benefits of hiring properly and giving it your full attention cannot be underestimated. There are times when your intuition about a person will want you to skip a step in validating their ability; don’t go there; keep to the script.
Internalising that you’ll never find the right person at the right time (unless you’re incredibly lucky!) will set you up to complete this journey. Put in the work.
Well, friends, thank you as always for making it all the way down the page to the end. It’s nice to have you here, and .. it’s always nice when I hear something positive about how I’ve assembled my words into something worth your time. See you all soon.
What resonates most with me about this post is how it shines a light on weak hiring practices leading to organisational disruptions and uncomfortable conversations. It also makes me wonder how often organisations including recruitment considerations as part of long-term growth strategies