Why Most Bad Hires Are Made Before the Interview Even Starts

Insights from the coaching room

Most business owners I work with have made a bad hire.

Usually more than one.

And when it goes wrong, the conversation tends to sound the same.

"They interviewed really well."

"Their CV was perfect."

"On paper, they were exactly what we needed."

Then, a few months in, something isn't right.

The work gets done, but the team is unsettled.

A good manager starts talking about leaving.

Standards drift.

And the owner ends up stepping back in to fix it.

The natural reaction is to blame the person. Or the market. Or the recruiter.

In my experience, that's rarely where the real problem is.

Most bad hires aren't made in the interview.

They're made weeks or months earlier, in the way the business approaches hiring in the first place.

Hiring in a Hurry Is Hiring Badly

Here's a pattern I see a lot.

Someone resigns. Or the business wins a big contract. Or the team has been stretched for months and finally something breaks.

Suddenly there's a gap.

And the gap needs filling now.

So an advert goes out. A handful of CVs come back. Two or three people get interviewed. One of them seems fine.

They get the job.

Not because they were the right person.

Because they were the best of the options available that week.

That isn't a recruitment decision.

It's a rescue.

And rescues tend to be made with lower standards, less scrutiny and a lot of hope.

The problem is that the business then lives with that decision for years.

I think one of the most useful questions a leadership team can ask is a simple one:

"Who are we going to need in six months' time?"

Not who do we need today.

Who will we need, given where the business is heading?

If you're growing, you already know some of the answer. More work means more people. New services mean new skills. Ambitious goals usually mean someone has to step up and someone has to fill the space they leave behind.

A basic three-to-six-month resource plan won't stop every surprise.

But it will turn most hires from emergencies into decisions.

And a considered decision almost always beats a rescue.

You Hired the Skills. You Got the Whole Person.

This is the one that catches out good businesses most often.

When we recruit, we tend to focus on what's easy to see and easy to test.

Qualifications.

Years of experience.

Technical knowledge.

Previous job titles.

All of that matters.

But it's rarely why a hire fails.

Hires fail because of how someone behaves.

How they handle pressure.

How they treat the people around them.

Whether they take feedback or take offence.

Whether they own a problem or pass it on.

Whether they lift the team or quietly wear it down.

I've lost count of the number of times I've heard a version of this:

"They know the job inside out. But the team can't work with them."

That's not a skills problem.

That's a behaviour problem we didn't look for.

The cruel irony is that the more senior the role, the more this matters. A technically excellent manager with poor self-awareness can do more damage to a team than an inexperienced one who listens.

If your process only tests what someone knows, you're only assessing half of the person you're about to hire.

The Role Is Usually Fuzzier Than You Think

Ask three people in the business what a new role is for, and you'll often get three different answers.

The owner sees one thing.

The manager the person will report to sees another.

The team expects something else entirely.

So the new hire walks into a role that was never clearly defined, gets pulled in several directions, and gets judged against expectations nobody wrote down.

Then we wonder why they struggle.

Before an advert goes anywhere, I think every role needs clear answers to a few questions:

• What is this person here to achieve in their first 90 days?
• What will they own, fully, that nobody else does?
• How will we know they're doing a good job?
• What behaviours does this role need to succeed here, in this team?

If you can't answer those, you're not ready to recruit.

You're ready to have a conversation about the role first.

"We Just Go With Our Gut"

There's nothing wrong with instinct.

Experienced leaders often read people well.

But gut feel on its own has some well-known blind spots.

We tend to like people who are like us.

We're impressed by confidence, which isn't the same as competence.

We fill in the gaps with what we hope is true.

And a good interviewer can talk their way through a loose, friendly conversation without ever being properly tested.

A better process doesn't need to be complicated. It just needs to be consistent.

That might include:

• The same core questions for every candidate, so you're comparing like with like
• Questions about real past behaviour, not hypotheticals ("Tell me about a time you had to deal with a colleague who wasn't pulling their weight. What did you actually do?")
• A practical task that reflects the real job
• A behavioural or personality profile to inform the conversation, not replace it
• More than one person involved in the decision
• Proper references, with specific questions rather than a box-ticking call

None of that guarantees a great hire.

But it shifts the odds a long way in your favour.

Recruitment Shouldn't Live With the Owner

In a lot of established businesses, hiring still runs through the person at the top.

The owner writes the advert.

The owner sits in every interview.

The owner makes the final call.

That might have made sense when the business had ten people.

At 40, 60 or 80 people, it becomes a bottleneck. And it sends a quiet message to your managers.

"You run the team. But you don't choose it."

That's a hard position to be accountable from.

If a manager is going to own the performance of their team, I think they need to own a large part of building it. With a clear process, a shared standard and support where needed.

That's how hiring stops depending on one person's judgement and one person's diary.

It's also how managers learn to think about capability, not just headcount.

And it's a big part of moving from a business that relies on the owner to one that relies on a capable leadership team.

The First 90 Days Are Part of the Hire

Even a strong hire can fail if the start is poor.

I often hear owners describe onboarding as something like:

"We showed them around, introduced them to everyone and got them started."

That's an induction.

It isn't onboarding.

The first few months are where expectations are set, habits form and the new person decides what "normal" looks like in your business.

A simple onboarding plan should cover:

• Clear goals for the first 30, 60 and 90 days
• A named person responsible for helping them succeed
• Regular, honest check-ins, not just a review at the end of probation
• Early feedback on behaviours, not only output

And if something isn't right, the first 90 days are when to say so.

Not month nine.

Most hiring mistakes are visible early. The problem is that we hope they'll sort themselves out.

What Good Looks Like

When I see businesses recruit well, a few things tend to be true.

They know who they'll need before they need them.

They're clear on what the role is for.

They hire for behaviours as deliberately as they hire for skills.

They use a consistent process rather than a pleasant chat.

Managers are involved in, and accountable for, building their own teams.

And they treat the first 90 days as part of the hire, not something that happens after it.

None of this is clever.

It's just deliberate.

And deliberate beats rushed every time.

A Simple Test

Here's an exercise I'd encourage you to do with your management team.

Think about the last three people you hired.

For each one, ask:

1. Did we plan for this hire, or react to a gap?
2. Could we have written down, before we advertised, exactly what this person would own and achieve in their first 90 days?
3. Did we assess their behaviours as rigorously as their skills?
4. Was the decision made by more than one person, against an agreed standard?
5. Knowing what we know now, would we hire them again?

Then ask one more question, about the future:

"Who will this business need in six months, and when do we need to start looking?"

If the honest answers are mostly "no", "not really" and "we hadn't thought about it", that's not a failure.

It's a very clear place to start.

Final Thought

Most businesses don't have a recruitment problem.

They have a hiring process problem.

The bad hire usually isn't bad luck. It's the predictable result of hiring in a hurry, for the wrong things, without a clear idea of what the role needs.

The good news is that all of that is within your control.

Plan earlier.

Define the role properly.

Look as hard at how people behave as at what they know.

And give your managers the responsibility, and the tools, to build teams they can genuinely lead.

Because the people you hire over the next twelve months will shape your business for years.

It's worth getting the decision right before the interview even starts.