Stop Hiring Your Way Out of a Systems Problem
When pressure mounts in business, one of the easiest knee jerk reactions is to add headcount. It seems like the easiest way to increase capacity, increase outputs, and maybe help you meet your quarterly targets next time.
You’ve probably tried every hero hire under the sun. Maybe a sales expert, or a marketing whiz, or even someone who is deeply knowledgable of revenue operations.
Something we commonly find is that all leaders know deep down hiring isn’t really the answer. And they do it anyways. So, why?
Taking action means taking control
All humans possess the innate need to grab control of a situation. And how do we feel in control? By taking action.
Hiring is an action that can very easily feel like progress and put on this facade of momentum. So you bring another poor human into the chaos. And there’s no formal training program so they spend their first three months ramping up and learning everything in a completely different way than most others at the company were taught.
If they’re talented, they’re going to leave. If they’re not, they’re going to stay and make the problem worse. Not because they aren’t good at their job, but because they’ll just adapt to the environment they’re in.
A bad system will beat a good hire every single time.
Did you know the average cost to replace an employee is $28,000? And 89% of performance issues are actually just systems driven?
What does a systems problem look like?
Broken systems rarely appear broken at the leadership level. They usually present as a performance problem or a motivation problem. But here are some symptoms of a systems issue:
New hires that seemed so promising are underperforming
If one person is the point person for certain questions (i.e. “only Tara knows the answer to this”) you have a person propping up a major vulnerability (better hope they don’t leave)
There is no onboarding process, new hires are flying by the seat of their pants
Your high performers are the people compensating for lack of handoffs, stepping up if someone drops the ball because they didn’t know any better, or doing manual work between five tools that aren’t talking to each other
You’re only making deadlines because your people are working 80 hours a week or pulling all-nighters
Why do leaders keep doing this?
Some people might read this and say, “yeah, an inexperienced leader will do that”. When in reality, we see the EXACT opposite. It’s the seasoned executives who lean into the “hire first” reflex.
Sometimes it’s an ego issue. They don’t want to admit their systems are broken because it feels like a failure (see, major ego hit).
Sometimes they just don’t want to deal with. A board is a lot more accepting of a new hire than hiring an operations company to expose and heal vulnerabilities.
Sometimes it’s simply timing. Bad hires don’t impact companies for quite awhile (it can take up to 12 months!). Whereas the cost of not hiring is something you feel immediately in the present moment. You’re missing weekly targets or falling behind. This causes acute pain that usually wins the internal debate.
A brave leadership team understands that if there are ongoing issues, the answer is to pause, instead of hiring more people.
How to Diagnose Where the Issue Is For You
Take a peek into our discovery calls. They take less time than a standard interview process and expose whether orgs are experiencing capacity issues (and need to hire) or have clarity issues (and need a systems upgrade).
We’ll give you the audit without having to jump on a call with us. Try it:
If we hired this role tomorrow, what exactly would they do in week one? If the answer is unclear, the role isn't ready — the system is.
Can the person in this role succeed without understanding things that aren't written down anywhere?
Where are the handoffs in this function — and are they documented, owned, and measured?
Have we lost people in this role before? What was the official reason they left — and what was the real one?
If headcount were frozen for 90 days, what would we be forced to systematize? Should we just do that now?
Yeah. You can give us a call using this link.
Fix the System, Then Scale It
We’re not here to argue with you on your hiring strategy. Look, we’re a business too. We know firsthand that growth requires people. The 128 Collective exists to help organizations build the kind of operational clarity that makes great hires thrive.
What we’re here to argue is the sequence. If you add headcount to a crappy system, you continue to get crap. If you add headcount to a functioning system, you get compounding results.
Which do you prefer?
