Hiring is expensive. Getting it wrong is catastrophic.

Hi Reader,

Here is something that should make every business leader uncomfortable.

The most consequential decisions in any company, who you hire, what they are there to do, and whether they can actually do it, are made almost entirely without training.

No structured preparation. No framework. No evidence-based process.

Just instinct, a gut feeling, and the hope that the person who interviewed well will perform well.

According to SHRM research, supervisors spend an average of 17% of their working week managing, documenting, and correcting the output of a poorly performing hire.

One full day a week. Every week. For every bad hire still in the building.

This is not a people problem. It is a skills problem. And it sits at the feet of leadership.

Why It Keeps Happening

Most hiring decisions are made by people with no structured training in how to interview, how to define a role, or how to evaluate a candidate against evidence rather than instinct.

They are not gathering evidence in the interview room. They are having a conversation and hoping it tells them something true.

It rarely does.

Nearly three quarters of employers admit they have made a bad hire. GHSmart puts the average cost of a per bad hire at 2x - 20x annual salary. SHRM puts replacement costs for senior roles at up to 213% of annual salary.

That means the average business of 100 people is losing over 1 million per year just on replacement hires!

The Stakes Have Changed

But here's the thing, we are living in an era where companies of 30 people are doing the output that used to require 150.

This means every person carries a bigger part of the business.

In that environment, the wrong hire is not quietly underperforming in a corner. They are in every meeting, every decision, every client conversation. They drag on the team. They consume the founder's time. They slow everything down at exactly the moment speed matters most.

There is no such thing as a low-stakes hire in a lean business.

The Question Has Changed Too

It used to be: do I hire or do I promote?

That question is obsolete.

The question now is: do I hire, promote, train, enable with AI, or find the intersection between human capability and machine capability that makes both more effective than either alone?

BCG research from 2026 is clear. AI handles repeatable, data-heavy work. Humans handle judgment, relationships, and decisions where context, accountability, and trust matter.

The businesses that answer this question well will run leaner, deliver more, and build a cost advantage that compounds. The ones that do not will overhire into roles AI will make redundant and wonder why the numbers are not moving.

Most leaders are not asking this question seriously. They are outsourcing it to an HR function that was never built to answer it.

What Needs to Change

Leaders need three things they are currently not given.

Role clarity. Not a job description. A definition of the outcomes this person must deliver, the decisions they will own, and what success looks like at 90 days, six months, and twelve months.

Interview skill. Structured, evidence-based interviewing is a learnable skill. An interviewer who knows how to surface real evidence will consistently outperform one relying on instinct, regardless of seniority. This is not training for HR. It is training for every leader who makes hiring decisions.

A framework for the human-AI question. A clear, repeatable way to evaluate whether a gap requires a human, can be solved by AI, or needs both. This has to be answered before any hiring process begins.

These are not complicated fixes. They are absent ones. And their absence is costing businesses far more than they realise.