I've spent five decades helping companies avoid costly hiring mistakes and let me tell you – bad hires are like termites. You don't always see the damage right away, but given time, they’ll quietly destroy everything you've worked to build. Strategy included.
Topgrading’s VP, Andy Williams, led a powerful thought leadership session unpacking this exact topic. The title says it all: Hiring Mistakes: The Silent Killer of Business Strategy. And if you care about growth, performance, or just not wasting your budget, this is a recording worth watching.
Andy brought clarity to something I’ve witnessed in every industry, every decade: it’s not that leaders lack vision – it’s that they too often trust that vision to the wrong people.
When Execution Fails, Look at the Hires
Andy doesn’t sugar-coat it. You can have the world’s best business plan – well-funded, carefully structured, backed by top advisors – and it will fall flat if you staff it with the wrong people. As he put it, and I quite agree:
“A hole in the org chart is serious but usually better than an a-hole in the seat.”
In other words, a vacant role is frustrating, and the absence of an A Player in a key role can be devastating. If you're operating without proper financial oversight while searching for a CFO, the fines could break you. But a hiring mistake? That is usually more devastating. Hiring mistakes erode culture, derail progress, and damage your credibility as a leader.
But you know that. What you might have experienced is a hiring mistake that has you fooled – like the new VP of IT who convinces you (a non-expert) to misspend a fortune … and you don’t realize it until a year later, when the money’s gone and the IT department is a mess.
A People Problem Disguised as Strategy Failure
It’s convenient to blame “market conditions” or “unforeseen obstacles.” But if your business strategy consistently struggles to take hold, there’s a good chance the issue is your hiring process.
Andy highlighted a few of the most common culprits:
The cost of a hiring mistake isn’t just salary – it’s lost opportunity, wasted management time, and compounding dysfunction.
➡️ Not convinced? Try our Cost of a Hiring Mistake Calculator and see for yourself. This popular tool will blow your mind. Almost everyone underestimates the financial hit – and even more so, the time drain hiring mistakes cause for your team.
Track What Matters: Three KPIs to Gauge Your Hiring Health
Andy introduced important hiring metrics every leader should track, including:
This isn’t fluff. If you track sales, revenue, and profit – but ignore these – you’re only measuring half your business.
Resumes Are the Wrong Way to Source Candidates
Andy said it bluntly: resumes are marketing brochures. They’re designed to impress, not confess. And yet, most companies still begin hiring here. You hand recruiters a job description, but too often these are vague and don’t include measurable accountabilities.
Topgrading starts with a Job Scorecard that includes exactly what the person must accomplish.
Source Like You Mean It
It’s not just who you hire, it’s where you find them. If your sourcing strategy is posting a job on Indeed and praying for greatness, you’re already behind.
Andy shared how great companies, like TD Industries, achieve up to 40% of their hires through referrals. That’s not luck. That’s a culture – and a system – that attracts A Players. Are you doing the same?
Other high-impact sources:
The Most Revealing Interview: The Topgrading Interview
Most hiring interviews are haphazard, incomplete, gamed by candidates, and obviously designed to avoid revealing the weaker points that would cause them to fail. It’s “obvious” because you’ve had too many hiring mistakes.
The Topgrading Interview is a structured, chronological, evidence-based interview. We look at a candidate’s full career arc. We ask for reference calls with the most important people for you to talk with – managers they reported to. Candidates – not you – arrange those calls, so there’s no dodging accountability. And we teach you how to spot patterns that matter.
Topgrading is the ultimate insurance policy for good hires.
This isn’t about adding process for process’ sake. It’s about protecting your business – your strategy, your team, your time. Every great outcome starts with a great hire. And every regrettable one? You guessed it.
As Andy reminded us: Strategy doesn’t fail in the boardroom. It fails in the trenches, when the wrong people are hired.
🎥 If you missed the session, do yourself (and your P&L) a favor:
👉 Watch the full presentation now
Because your strategy deserves A Players.
We regularly host thought leadership presentations just like this one.
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Topgrading can help you hire honest, high performers. Contact us.
Dr. Brad Smart is Founder and CEO of Topgrading, Inc. Topgrading is dedicated to helping companies of all sizes maximize the hiring of high performers. Topgrading assesses candidates for senior positions (where the costs of hiring mistakes are high) and trains all managers to create teams of almost all high performers. Brad has seven published books on hiring; the most recent three (the first, second, and third editions of Topgrading) were all best sellers.
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