What 15 Years in Hiring Has Taught Me
I have spent about 15 years working around hiring, assessments, talent strategy and business growth. I have been the recruiter, the hiring manager, the commercial leader and eventually the CEO, making the hiring decisions myself.
So naturally, I have developed opinions. 😅
Some came from searches that went beautifully. Others came from watching very clever people make surprisingly questionable hiring decisions.
And at least one came from making a bad hire of my own.
Here are the things I now believe about hiring.
1. Hiring is a business decision before it is an HR decision.
I will probably die on this hill.
When I start a brief with a CEO, I don't really want to begin with the job description. In fact, please don't spend three weeks perfecting one for my benefit.
Tell me the problem.
What isn't working today? What needs to change? What are you hoping this person will have fixed, built or grown twelve months from now?
I can usually tell within about ten minutes whether enough thinking has gone into this. The funny thing is that when we haven't really defined the problem, the search tends to become incredibly narrow: "They must come from this exact industry, with this exact title, having worked in these five companies…"
That is normally when I start asking annoying questions. 😄
Give me your hopes and dreams for the role. We can build the JD afterwards.
2. Nothing will teach you about hiring quite like making a bad hire yourself.
Recruiters love talking about the "cost of a bad hire." It sounds very neat when you put it into a PowerPoint.
Living through one is considerably less neat.
I have made a bad hire. What I remember most isn't even the salary cost. It's the amount of energy it takes to undo the decision. The conversations. The management time. The effect on everyone else. And then eventually getting the person out of the business.
The bad taste hangs around.
But I've also experienced the opposite. Put the right person into the right role and the force-multiplier effect can be ridiculous. Suddenly things move. Problems disappear. Other people perform better.
Once you've experienced both, you understand why we spend so much time hunting for great people.
3. "They must come from our industry" is sometimes a requirement. Sometimes it's a comfort blanket.
This is one of the biggest patterns I see with senior hiring.
The company wants someone from exactly the same industry because it feels safe, and look, sometimes they're absolutely right.
But sometimes what the business really needs is a great leader, strong commercial thinking or somebody who knows how to solve the particular problem in front of them.
Some of the best talent I have found has come from unconventional places.
That matters even more in East Africa because the great candidates are being hunted by everybody. Talent pools can get small very quickly. Prestige matters. Titles matter. Compensation matters.
If you insist on finding the unicorn who has the exact title, exact industry, exact company background AND happens to want your job… good luck to all of us. 😂
Sometimes the trade-off you make is exactly what gives the organisation a different way of thinking.
4. Interviews have far too much power.
And I say this as someone who interviews people for a living.
One of my best hires this year gave a terrible interview.
Not "a little nervous." Terrible. We almost stopped halfway.
Something made us try again; we looked beyond that first interaction, continued gathering information and eventually hired him. He is now one of our strongest hires.
I was wrong about him.
That matters to me because recruiters can become just as attached to their instincts as hiring managers. Experience doesn't magically remove bias. Sometimes it just makes you more confident in it.
So yes, I will listen to my instinct.
Then I want evidence.
5. Assessments aren't magic. But I absolutely want the extra data point.
Recently we were hiring in Uganda.
It was already a difficult search, and the talent pool was limited. Eventually we found someone the entire client hiring team liked. Unanimously. Beautiful. Job done, right?
Not quite.
We put him through the assessments, and his critical-thinking results were much lower than we expected. Now, he could probably have done the role as it existed at that moment. The problem was that the client needed this person to grow into a much bigger role within roughly a year.
That changed the decision for me. I recommended we didn't hire him.
This is why I don't believe assessments should make hiring decisions, but I also don't understand why you would willingly ignore another useful piece of evidence when making an expensive one.
Interviews tell you something. Case studies tell you something. Assessments tell you something. References tell you something.
Put the stories together.
6. References should go deep. Deep deep.
I have become slightly obsessive about this one.
I particularly want to speak to the candidate's immediate manager. Not their favourite former colleague. Not the friendly board member who thinks they're wonderful.
Who actually managed them?
What were they like on a random Tuesday when things weren't going well? What did you have to coach them on? Where did they struggle? Would you hire them again?
We've also started paying attention when someone is very uncomfortable with us speaking to their immediate manager.
It doesn't automatically mean something is wrong. There can be perfectly legitimate reasons.
But from our own searches, it has become a signal I don't casually ignore.
References shouldn't be a box we tick once we've already emotionally hired the person. They are part of the evidence.
7. "There is no talent in the market" makes me curious.
Whenever I hear this, two thoughts normally enter my head.
Either the search has become incredibly narrow… or somebody has hiring trauma. 😂
Sometimes there genuinely isn't much talent available. East African talent markets can be small, especially once you combine function, seniority, geography, compensation and sector.
But sometimes "there's nobody" actually means "we have looked at all the obvious people."
Those are different problems.
One of my favourite searches was for a global CFO with a very specific industry background and some very particular cultural requirements.
On paper, the pool looked tiny.
So we went country by country. Professional association by professional association. University by university. Community by community.
Eventually, conversations within those communities started opening other doors.
We found him. They hired him.
There is a particular sentence I love hearing from clients: "Where do you find these candidates? We have been searching for six months and none of these people were on our radar."
That sentence makes my little recruiter heart very happy. 😂
8. Internal recruitment teams are not lazy. I was wrong about that.
This is something I've genuinely changed my mind about.
Earlier in my career, I sometimes looked at internal recruitment teams and wondered: Why aren't they doing more? Why is this taking so long?
Now I understand the job very differently.
They aren't lazy.
Many are carrying too many vacancies, dealing with too many hiring managers, managing candidate experience, reporting, internal politics, compensation conversations and the CEO who suddenly remembered at 4pm that the role they discussed three months ago is now "URGENT."
And then we ask why they haven't mapped 14 industries across four countries. ðŸ˜
Sometimes HR doesn't need another lecture about hiring faster. They need capacity. They need market intelligence. They need tools that allow them to widen the search.
And occasionally they need leadership to admit that the hiring problem isn't actually an HR problem.
9. I don't believe every role needs a search firm.
There. I said it.
If you're looking for a CFO from a particular manufacturing subsector, there are seven obvious candidates, everybody knows who they are, and they're all active on LinkedIn… You probably don't need me. Call them.
Where I become useful is when the answer is not obvious. The search has failed. The market looks thin. The business wants something unusual. The obvious candidates aren't working. Or the role is important enough that you need somebody spending real time mapping, questioning and testing the market.
That's also why I believe in retained search. It gives me permission to invest properly in the problem instead of turning recruitment into a race where five recruiters throw CVs at the client and whoever emails first wins.
Nobody does their best work in a CV Hunger Games.
10. You can often tell much earlier than 90 days whether a hire is working.
This one may get me into trouble.
I believe that, much of the time, the signals are already visible within the first 30 days.
Not whether the person knows every system. Not whether they have completely transformed the business. But you can start seeing things.
How do they think? How quickly are they understanding the business? What questions are they asking? How are they building relationships? Are they solving problems or waiting to be told what to do? How are people responding to them?
This is also why onboarding by prayers and vibes makes me slightly itchy.
We invest months finding a senior person, assess them, interview them seven times, negotiate the package, announce them to the company… …and then on Monday morning someone shows them where the bathroom is and wishes them luck.
Surely we can do better. ðŸ˜
After 15 years, I am probably less impressed by certainty than I used to be.
I have backed candidates clients weren't sure about. I have advised clients against candidates they loved. I have been right plenty of times. I have also been wrong.
What experience has given me isn't a magical ability to look into someone's eyes and know whether they will succeed.
It has given me better questions. More patterns to compare. More places to look. And a much healthier respect for evidence.
So if you ever bring me a job description, don't be surprised if I put it aside for a minute and ask: What are we actually trying to solve?
That's where the interesting part starts.