Growth Hired the Wrong People. Now What?

Hindsight Is a Wonderful Thing

There's a phrase that surfaces in almost every honest founder conversation about a hire that didn't work out.

If only foresight had the power of hindsight - said with a wry smile and a slight shrug.

And then everyone moves on because there's too much else to deal with.

But hindsight deserves more than a shrug. Because in the context of hiring - particularly in growing, founder-led businesses - the things that become obvious in retrospect could actually be visible in advance if these things were given the thoughtful scoping beforehand.

The Appointment That Made Sense

A founder I spoke to recently had recruited a sales manager from a prestigious brand with a strong commercial reputation. On paper and through formal interview rounds it looked like a considered, good-fit appointment. Strong background. Credible track record. Relevant sector experience. Someone who appeared genuinely capable of helping the business grow beyond the founder.

Eighteen months later he exited by mutual agreement.

The interesting thing wasn't that the hire hadn't worked because businesses make unsuccessful hires every day - it's par for the course. But in this instance, all bases seemed covered. The business had identified a genuine need. The individual had a credible track record. The interview process had been thorough. Nobody had behaved recklessly or offered and accepted hastily. Yet it still didn't work out.

When you look in the rear-view mirror, the reason becomes clearer. He had spent his career in an environment where his previous company's brand had the pedigree and heritage and largely did the heavy lifting for him. Customers arrived already interested. His role was essentially conversion, not creation. In his new role nobody had heard of him and nobody was coming to find him. He had to earn the relationship before he could even begin to talk about what he was selling and build his own pipeline from scratch.

That's a fundamentally different commercial instinct. And it's one that's almost impossible to assess from a CV or a formal interview process - unless you know to look for it.

The Numbers Behind the Decision

Before exploring why this pattern repeats, it's worth understanding what it actually costs. Because the financial reality of a failed hire in a growing SME is significantly heavier than most founders anticipate when they make the appointment.

According to the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, UK businesses fail to hire the right person for two in every five roles. The total cost of a failed mid-level hire on a salary of £42,000 - once recruitment fees, lost productivity, management time and replacement costs are factored in - spirals to £132,015. (REC / Oxford Economics)

But the cost conversation starts well before failure. The true first-year outlay for a £36,000 external sales hire - including employer NICs, pension contributions, recruitment agency fees, hardware, software licensing and the three-month productivity deficit while they find their feet - lands at just over £51,000 before they've opened a single meaningful pipeline conversation. (REC / Oleeo)

For a growing SME business this isn't a footnote on an HR director's monthly report. It's a commercial decision carrying significant financial exposure from the moment the offer letter is signed.

Growth Changes What a Business Needs

One of the less discussed realities of growth is that the business eventually outgrows some of the capabilities that got it there in the first place. A significant contract win can expose resource gaps overnight. A new market requires expertise the business has never needed before. A key person leaves and takes years of accumulated knowledge with them. Or growth reaches a point where the founder can no longer carry it alone - and the business needs senior leadership and operational structure around them to move forward. In all of these situations, hiring feels like the rational response. And it often is.

The difficulty is that identifying the need for additional capability is usually much easier than understanding what that capability needs in order to succeed - in the business, at that stage of its development.

Most hiring processes ask whether someone can do the job. But the question worth asking first is whether they can do the job in the business that’s hiring. Those are not the same question. And the gap between them is where many hiring mistakes actually live.

Growing businesses often recruit for the business they want to be rather than the one they actually are. The role is written for a future version - a little like a wish list set in a perfect environment. The individual is assessed against that future. And then they arrive into the present - with all its gaps, its informality, its founder dependency and discover that the job they were hired for and the job they've arrived into are not quite the same thing.

Capability vs. Adaptability

There's a distinction that most hiring processes can miss entirely and it's the one that matters most in an SME business.

Capability is what someone has done. Adaptability is whether they can do it in your business.

The sales manager story is really an adaptability story. He had genuine capability. What he hadn't been tested on and what the hiring process never explored - was whether he could create demand rather than convert it, build a pipeline without infrastructure behind him and operate effectively when process doesn't yet exist.

Those aren't questions that appear on a job description. They rarely come up in a formal interview. But they are the questions that determine whether a hire succeeds or quietly disappoints in a growing, founder-led environment.

Hope vs. Expectation

The most expensive hire isn't always the one who fails visibly either. It's sometimes the one who arrives with everyone's hope attached and quietly underdelivers against every expectation - turning up, doing enough, never quite building what they were brought in to build. No disaster. No red warning flags. Just a persistent, draining gap between what was hoped for and what was actually delivered.

The appointment was made with hope. The expectation gets quietly managed down over weeks and months until one day everyone acknowledges what they've known for a while.

And by then the cost - financial, commercial and cultural - has already compounded.

The legal landscape has sharpened this further. Under the UK Employment Rights Act 2025, the qualifying window before an employee gains unfair dismissal protection reduces to just six months - down from the previous two-year threshold. (Employment Rights Act 2025) Miss that window and a straightforward performance conversation becomes a procedurally complex, potentially costly employment matter. The pressure to get the hire right first time has never been greater.

The Questions Worth Asking Before the Appointment

This is where hindsight becomes genuinely useful - not as a comfort after things go wrong but as a discipline before the decision is made.

Is this role written for the business you are now or the business you want to be? Because those require genuinely different people.

Are you hiring someone to build something from scratch or to manage something that already exists? Those are fundamentally different commercial instincts and they don't always live in the same person.

Does this individual's track record come from an environment where the brand, the structure or an inbound pipeline did most of the hard yards already - and are you expecting them to operate without any of those things?

Have you been honest about what working in your business actually looks like - the pace, the ambiguity, the founder's involvement, the gaps in processes - or have you presented the best version of the business and hoped for the best?

And are you ready to create the conditions this hire needs to succeed? Because bringing capability in and then failing to support it properly is a pattern that costs businesses far more than the hire itself.

Growth Doesn't Just Create Capability Requirements

It creates organisational requirements too.

How often do growing businesses recruit capability before they've created the conditions for that capability to succeed? Not quite ready for the people they're trying to recruit. Not quite structured enough to absorb them. Not quite honest enough about what success looks like to give them a fair chance.

The hire isn't always the mistake.

Sometimes the mistake is hiring before the business is ready to receive what it's asking for.

Hindsight makes that obvious.

The questions above make it visible a little earlier.