A few years ago, I worked with a Covid testing startup that went from zero to around $40 million in turnover in 21 months. We placed over 220 people and built every division from scratch, including finance, sales, marketing, IT, and the science teams running the labs. That kind of growth doesn’t happen by accident, or by panicking and grabbing whoever is available. It happens because the hiring is treated as seriously as the growth itself.
Most businesses don’t get that memo. Growth is supposed to feel like winning, so why does it so often feel like the wheels are coming off?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth after thirty years of watching this play out: growth doesn’t break businesses. Bad hiring does.
The first problem appears before any panic hire is made: most growing businesses do not know which role to hire next. Instead of a people strategy, they have an expanding pile of unfinished work.
That gap is often filled by everyone’s favorite non-solution: the good all-rounder. Someone who can muck in and do a bit of everything sounds efficient, but it rarely is. It usually magnifies existing problems, adds another direct report to manage, and pulls you back into every corner of the business instead of freeing you from it. The solution is to stop hiring vague all-rounders and break the work into clearly defined roles, so you can bring in specialists who know their area better than you do and can focus on it properly.
Once panic sets in, hiring gets worse. Let’s be brutally honest about what “hiring fast” looks like: skipped reference checks, gutfeel offers, job descriptions bashed out in 20 minutes flat. It’s about as strategic as putting out a house fire with a water pistol.
Leadership IQ found that 46% of new hires fail within 18 months, largely because of exactly this kind of rushed process. Nearly half of all hires crash and burn before they’ve even found the coffee machine.
And it’s not just the salary you lose. Add recruitment costs, onboarding, training, and the manager hours spent coaching someone who was never going to work out, and a bad hire can cost at least 30% of their first-year salary, $20,000 on a $67,000 role, before the opportunity cost or the damage to morale.
Tony Hsieh, the late former CEO of Zappos, once estimated bad hires had cost his company over $100 million. Scale that down and the danger stops being abstract, especially since a single poor hire can drag productivity down by around 36 percent. That drop doesn’t stay contained to the underperformer. Colleagues pick up the slack, deadlines slip, and leaders end up firefighting instead of leading. Momentum stalls quietly, then all at once.
Hiring for skills and hoping the fit sorts itself out doesn’t work either. A staggering 89 percent of hiring failures in the first 18 months come down to poor cultural fit, not a lack of ability. You can teach someone a skill in a weekend. You can’t reprogram how they treat people or align with what you stand for.
Then there’s the unicorn problem, the external cousin of the all-rounder trap: job ads for a technical genius who’s also a brilliant communicator, endlessly innovative yet rigidly process-driven, prepared to deliver caviar results for instant noodle money. That person doesn’t exist. You either get a permanently unfilled role or someone who talked a spectacular game and turned out to be a horse with an ice cream cone strapped to its head.
Underpay to save cash and you will pay twice over. A 2020 Glassdoor survey found 45 percent of employees cite salary as a top reason for leaving, and turnover always costs more than paying properly the first time.
None of this means slamming the brakes on growth. It means building a process before the panic sets in. Draw your organizational chart for the size of business you’re becoming, not the one you’re running now, so you know exactly who you’re hiring for. Split the all-rounder role into clearly defined ones. Write job descriptions that are specific, not a wish list for a mythical creature. Interview for values as rigorously as you interview for skills. And where a role is likely to morph fast as you scale, bring in interim or outsourced support before committing to someone permanent.
The founders who scale well treat recruitment as a strategic priority, not an admin task squeezed in after everything “important” is done. That Covid testing startup didn’t hit $40 million by hiring on gut feel or stacking up all-rounders. Every one of those 220-plus hires was made deliberately, at speed, without cutting corners.
Growth will always tempt you to hire fast. The businesses that keep their momentum are the ones with the discipline to hire well instead.
