You hired the wrong person. Here is why it happened before the interview started.

What you'll learn today

Burnout and stress can make it hard to focus and keep up at work. That pressure builds, creating a cycle that’s tough to break.

If you’re looking for a way to ease workplace stress without feeling drowsy, try CBDistillery’s Daytime Calm gummies.

Each serving contains 50mg of CBG, a non-intoxicating compound derived from hemp, formulated to support calm and daytime focus.

In a 2022 CBDistillery study, CBG was associated with:

Like all CBDistillery products, Daytime Calm gummies are third-party lab tested for quality and consistency.

Special Deal for Our Readers: Use code COOL to save 25% on your first order.

Keep Your Cool

I have made bad hires. Most leaders have; they just do not always admit it.

And the pattern is almost always the same. The person interviewed well. They had the experience on paper. They said the right things in the room. And then three months in, something was off. Not dramatically, not obviously at first. Just a quiet sense that the fit was not right. The energy was not quite what the team needed.

By the time it becomes undeniable, you are already six months in. You have invested time, onboarding, and goodwill. The cost of getting it wrong is not just the hire. It is everything the team absorbs while you figure it out.

Most leaders think bad hires happen because they missed something in the interview. In my experience, they happen further back than that. Before the first conversation. In how the role gets defined, what you are actually screening for, and whether you are honest with yourself about what your team really needs right now versus what looks good on a job description.

There is a version of a hiring process that looks thorough. Multiple interview rounds. A panel. Structured questions. Competency frameworks. And at the end of it you make a hire that does not work, and nobody can explain why because the process was followed correctly.

The process being followed correctly is not the same as the process filtering for the right things. Most hiring processes are designed to reduce the risk of a bad interview, not the risk of a bad hire. Those are different problems.

The weekly challenge

Before your next hire, write down the three things that would make someone exceptional in this specific role, on this specific team, at this specific moment. Not the job description. Not the competency framework. The real answer. If you cannot write it in three sentences you are not ready to interview yet.

Cap table management doesn’t have to be frustrating. From issuing grants to 409A valuations or ASC 718 reporting Pulley can make it simple. 

Just ask Linear. They knew they needed a partner who could handle the complexity of their equity management. That’s why they migrated to Pulley.

Learn why Linear chose Pulley

Principle 01 - You are not hiring for the role. You are hiring for the environment.

The job description tells you what someone needs to be able to do. It says almost nothing about what it takes to thrive in your team right now. A high performer in a structured, well-resourced environment can completely struggle in one that is scrappy and fast-moving. The skills transfer. The fit does not always follow.

The leaders who hire well are obsessive about environment. They know exactly what their team rewards and what it punishes. They know where new people tend to struggle in the first ninety days and why. And they interview for that, not just for the capability on the tin. The question is not just can they do this job. It is will they do it well here, with these people, in the way this team actually operates.

Principle 02 - The interview is not where you find out if someone is good. It is where you find out if they are honest.

Almost everyone interviews well at a basic level. They have prepared. They know the frameworks. They have a story for every competency question you are going to ask. What you are not going to find out from that process is how they think when they are stuck, how they handle feedback they disagree with, or what they are genuinely like on a bad week.

The leaders who hire well have stopped trying to catch people out and started trying to see how people actually think. They ask for the real story behind the headline answer. They follow the thread that feels slightly uncomfortable rather than the one that confirms what they already want to believe. The moment the interview becomes a checklist you start hiring people who are good at checklists.

Principle 03 - Your gut is data, but it is not the decision.

Every leader has made a hire because something felt right and regretted it. And most have also talked themselves out of a strong instinct and regretted that too. The gut is not the problem. What you do with it is.

The best leaders use instinct as a signal to investigate, not a reason to decide. If something feels off, name it specifically and then test it. And when something feels right, ask yourself whether that feeling is about the candidate or about the fact that they reminded you of how you like to be spoken to. Those are different things. Knowing the difference is what separates a hiring process that works from one that just confirms your existing biases at speed.

Members-only section includes:

See you Sunday.