What We Were Actually Hiring For

We scaled the startup fast. Revenue was growing, the team was small, and we needed people in roles almost before we had defined what those roles were. The job descriptions we wrote during that period were honest in the broadest sense – the titles were accurate, the responsibilities were real – but they were vague in the ways that matter most.

We hired a small number of people into senior roles who left quickly. At the time, the conversation was about fit, about whether they were the right people for the business at that stage. It was only later, looking at the pattern, that I noticed something simpler. The word ‘senior’ in our job descriptions was doing work we had never discussed. To us, it meant an experienced individual contributor – someone who could operate independently and get things done. To some of the people we hired, it meant a step toward managing a team and stepping back from the day-to-day. Neither interpretation was unreasonable. We had just never said which one we meant.

That is not a candidate failure. That is a job description problem. And the job description problem is a systems problem.

Selection Works Because Clarity Works

From the very beginning of Royal Marines selection, the entry criteria for both officers and other ranks are stringent and policy-driven. There is no ambiguity about what is being assessed or why. Candidates understand what the process will test them on. The organisation understands what it is selecting for. As a result, the people who make it through are aligned with what the organisation needs. The false positive rate is low, not because the process is harder, but because it is clearer.

Most civilian hiring is the opposite. The criteria are implicit. The role is described in terms of outputs rather than the specific capabilities the organisation actually needs. The culture is characterised by adjectives such as fast-paced, collaborative, and innovative, which mean nothing without context. The candidate is expected to infer what success looks like because the organisation has not done the harder work of making it explicit.

The Royal Marines do not have better instincts about people than civilian hiring managers. They have clearer clarity about what they are selecting. That is the variable that makes the difference.

Hiring Under Pressure Looks Like Decisiveness

When an organisation is growing fast, resource-constrained, or trying to fill a role that barely exists yet, the conditions push toward speed. You need someone. You have a candidate who seems capable. The instinct is to move.

What happens in that moment is worth examining. The hiring decision – we need someone who can do this – and the working relationship – this person needs to know what they are actually here to do – are two different problems. The pressure solves the first one. It does almost nothing for the second.

When I look back at the hires that did not work out during the startup’s fast-growth period, the pattern is consistent. The decision to hire was made under pressure, and the work of aligning expectations was either rushed or skipped entirely. The candidate was capable. The organisation was unclear. The failure was ours.

There is a principle in mature hiring organisations that is simple and almost universally accepted in the abstract: it is better to pass on a good candidate than to hire a bad one. Most organisations agree with this. Very few of them actually hold the line when they are resource-constrained, growing rapidly, or chasing a candidate who has other options. The pressure is real, and the principle collapses under it. The result is a hire that looked decisive at the time and looks like a mistake six months later.

The Space Between What Was Said and What Was Heard

The expectation gap is not usually the result of dishonesty on either side. The organisation wrote a role description and described what the job involves. The candidate read it and formed a picture of what they were joining. Both pictures were plausible interpretations of the same text.

The gap opens because job descriptions are written to attract candidates, not to describe the working reality with precision. The gap opens because interview conversations are about potential and fit, not about the specific factors that will determine whether this particular person succeeds in this particular role. The gap opens because the organisation itself may not have done the work of asking: what does success in this role actually look like in twelve months, and what specific capabilities and behaviours does that require?

In our case, the word ‘senior’ carried the full weight of that unasked question. We were in a phase where every person in the business needed to be doing – building, shipping, selling, solving. We needed experienced people who were energised by the work itself. Some of the people we hired were excellent but had reached a point in their careers where they were looking for something different. There is nothing wrong with that. But we had not written a job description that made the distinction clear, and we had not had a conversation that surfaced it.

The candidate did not fail to fit. We failed to describe what we needed them to fit into.

What the Pattern Tells You

A single bad hire is an event. A pattern of bad hires is a signal.

If you look at your own organisation’s hiring history – not one disappointing appointment, but the pattern – and you see repeated failures in a particular type of role or at a particular level, the question worth asking is not how to run a better interview process. The question is what the pattern is revealing about how you have defined those roles, communicated expectations, or articulated what your organisation actually is.

A chief executive (‘CEO’) who has hired three people into the same function in two years and found all three lacking is not necessarily a poor judge of talent. They may be running an organisation whose culture is so implicit that new arrivals cannot locate themselves within it. They may be hiring for a role whose actual scope changes materially after someone is in it. They may be clear in their own head about what success looks like, but have never said it out loud in terms a new hire could act on.

The pattern is diagnostic. It is more honest than any single post-mortem. If you are willing to look at it.

The Post-Mortem Nobody Runs

When a hire fails, the post-mortem – if one happens at all – tends to focus on the hiring decision. Was the interview process rigorous enough? Did we check references properly? Were there signals we missed?

These are reasonable questions. They are also the wrong starting point.

The harder post-mortem starts with the organisation. Was the role clearly defined before we hired? Did we explicitly communicate what success would look like and when? Did we change direction after the hire in ways that shifted what the person was trying to do? Did the culture they encountered feel like the culture we described? Did anyone sit down with them in the first few weeks and have a direct conversation about what they were there to do, how progress would be measured, and what decisions they were authorised to make?

Most organisations skip that post-mortem. They move on to the next hire without looking at what the previous one taught them. The result is a hiring process that gets more elaborate over time – more interviews, more assessments, more reference calls – while the underlying problem remains untouched.

The Question Worth Sitting With

Think about the last hire in your organisation that did not work out. At what point did the mismatch become visible? Was it a mismatch in capability, or was it a mismatch between what the person thought they were joining and what they found when they got there?

And when you reviewed what happened, did the conversation stay with the candidate, or did it turn to the role definition, the onboarding, the expectations that were set or not set before they started?

If the conversation stayed with the candidate, you have probably not yet found the problem.