Most leaders treat hiring as a coin toss. If it lands badly, they go again. At around £150k per bad flip, it is the most expensive coin in the company. I walk through the full cost breakdown in this 3 minute video.

One mis-hire on a £100k salary costs about £150k. Recruiting £25k Ramp time £35k Lost output £55k Team drag £25k Exit £10k A software contract that size gets a business case. A hire gets a good feeling after an interview. Built a calculator. Reply MISHIRE and I'll send it.

Nobody in your hiring process is paid to be right in eighteen months. Your recruiter sourced, screened, helped you close. Invoice goes out, placement fee cashes, and the relationship is functionally over before your new exec has finished their onboarding deck. Meanwhile, you're still nine months from knowing if the hire worked, and eighteen from knowing if it compounded. This isn't a shot at recruiters — most of the ones I know are sharp and honest. It's a shot at the contract. Paid at signature, protected by a replacement clause that only triggers if the person walks inside 90 days. The incentive they actually optimise for is "don't get fired in quarter one," not "deliver outcomes by month eighteen." So every senior hire runs on an invisible bet. The recruiter bets they'll stay. You bet they'll perform. Nobody bets they'll compound. If it doesn't work, the recruiter is three clients down the line. You're writing the severance, absorbing the lost quarter, rebuilding the team's confidence. If you're a GP, you're watching it ripple across a full holding period. The question worth asking before the next search: who is on the hook with me after day 90? If the answer is nobody, you're the risk.

The most expensive person on your team is the one nobody's worried about. That's the asymmetry nobody talks about. A hire who blows up in six months is painful, but cauterised — you know what happened, you fix the process, you move on. A B-player is different. Not bad enough to fire. Not good enough to move the org. They ship something every quarter. They show up to the offsite. They eventually get promoted because the alternative is a conversation nobody has time to have. The cost compounds quietly. The senior seat they occupy gets blocked. The A-player who would have taken it goes somewhere else. Every decision inside their scope gets made at 70% of what's possible. None of it lands on a P&L line — which is exactly why it survives every review. By year three, you've paid for a mis-hire three times over and kept the person. At portfolio scale, this is where fund value quietly disappears. Most founders can name the mis-hires they regret. Very few can name the B-players still on payroll. The question isn't "would I hire this person again today?" — that one's too easy to rationalise around. It's "if they resigned tomorrow, would I chase them, or use the moment to upgrade?"

The most expensive person on your team is the one nobody's worried about. That's the asymmetry nobody talks about. A hire who blows up in six months is painful, but cauterised — you know what happened, you fix the process, you move on. A B-player is different. Not bad enough to fire. Not good enough to move the org. They ship something every quarter. They show up to the offsite. They eventually get promoted because the alternative is a conversation nobody has time to have. The cost compounds quietly. The senior seat they occupy gets blocked. The A-player who would have taken it goes somewhere else. Every decision inside their scope gets made at 70% of what's possible. None of it lands on a P&L line — which is exactly why it survives every review. By year three, you've paid for a mis-hire three times over and kept the person. At portfolio scale, this is where fund value quietly disappears. Most founders can name the mis-hires they regret. Very few can name the B-players still on payroll. The question isn't "would I hire this person again today?" — that one's too easy to rationalise around. It's "if they resigned tomorrow, would I chase them, or use the moment to upgrade?"

The best hire you ever made probably didn't impress you in the room. That's the uncomfortable finding of sixty years of selection research, and it shows up every time I ask a founder to describe their strongest operator. The answer almost never starts with "she interviewed brilliantly." Confidence is what an interview selects for. Competence is what the job selects for. They are not the same variable. They are not even strongly correlated. The candidate who paused, revised their answer, said "I don't know, here's how I'd figure it out" — that's often the stronger operator. The one with a clean three-part framework for every question is often someone who's performed this conversation many times and learned nothing from any of them. Founders know this. They say it out loud a year later: "I was dazzled in the room." The problem is that dazzle is exactly what a forty-five-minute conversation is designed to produce. If the process that chose your last three senior hires was "whoever interviewed best," it's not a process. It's a taste test dressed as a decision. And if you're running that same taste test across eight portfolio companies, you're not diversifying the risk — you're compounding it. The fix isn't more interviews. It's fewer interviews doing less work, and structured signal that doesn't need someone to perform for you to collect it.

The phrase ”hiring intelligence” gets meaninglessly thrown around too much these days. Let me break down what it really means. Hiring intelligence uses the data you gather when you hire to assess candidate signals against success markers for a given role and stage. Most companies make a hiring decision without any supporting data, wait 6 months to assess if it's a hit or miss, then start again, without ever learning what made the last hire a win or a loss. The only way you can build a coherent leadership team is if each new hire is the result of learnings from previous hires. That entails having a system that acts as a feedback loop between a pre-hire gut feel, and a post-hire outcome down the line. The more executive the role, the more every hire is a "bet the house" decision. One mistake can burn a deal, portfolio performance, or an entire funding round. So stop taking the risk of hiring a charismatic but mis-aligned COO when your company or deal depends on it, especially when infrastructure is readily available to improve your odds.

"I'll know it when I see it" is not a hiring strategy. Define the competencies, lay down the must-haves, use blind review, then interview.

Stop scoring interviews 1-10. Nobody can tell a 6 from a 7, and the scale just gives you room to talk yourself into whoever you already liked.

Non-technical roles get less rigour than technical ones, not because they matter less, but because you don’t build the equivalent of a coding test for judgment.

The halo effect happens when a candidate is articulate and likeable, so the interviewer assumes they're also competent. Works great until the quarter after they're hired.

If two candidates in the same interview loop get asked different questions, you didn't run an interview. You had two separate conversations and they are not comparable.

If you can't tell whether a hire is working until month six, it's a measurement failure. You can spot these signals just a month in and save yourself the costs.

It's tempting to hire on gut, but don't act surprised when gut is wrong a third of the time. If you want precision, then cut through the noise of glamorous CVs and crafted presentation.

HBR's figure for a bad senior hire is x3 to x15 times their gross salary and this is not even because of severance. The opportunity cost and wasted momentum are where a business gets hit most.

Relying on your gut on and polished candidate story telling is not an acceptable hiring strategy. Like every other consequential decision you've taken in your company, you need metrics and a feedback-loop to improve future decision making.

Before making an offer, every founder should write a pre-hire memo. If you cannot explain why they will succeed, what risks exist, and how those risks will be managed, you are not making a risk-adjusted decision. You are throwing a Hail Mary on a high stakes call.

Your first COO should not be your mini-me. They should be the person who fills the operating gaps you keep compensating for with founder energy.

An ATS tracks your hiring process, but doesn't track hiring quality. Scaling founders need both, especially when the hire can change the trajectory of their company.