The first senior hire from outside

There is a moment in the life of most growing companies when the founder concludes that the next stage requires somebody who has done it before. A commercial director, a chief operating officer, a general manager for a new market. The search is run seriously, the shortlist is strong, an impressive person is hired, and roughly half the time they are gone inside a year with both sides privately convinced the other was the problem.

The recruitment is rarely where it went wrong. By the time a good candidate has accepted, the conditions that determine whether they succeed have already been set, and almost all of them are on the company's side of the table.

Three ways it fails

The mandate was never written down

The job description described a person. It did not describe a result. Six months in, the founder is disappointed and the hire is confused, because they were solving the problem they understood themselves to have been hired for, which was not the one the founder had in mind. A useful test before any search: write the single sentence that will be true in twelve months if this hire has worked. If that sentence is hard to write, the company is not ready to recruit.

Responsibility without authority

The hire owns a target but cannot approve spending against it, cannot change the team, and cannot alter the process that produces the number. This is the most common configuration and the most reliably fatal. Senior people do not leave because the job is hard. They leave because they are accountable for something they are not permitted to change.

The founder is still doing the job

The most delicate of the three, because it is rarely deliberate. The founder hires a commercial director and keeps taking the important customer calls, out of habit and often out of genuine helpfulness. The organisation reads this accurately within about a fortnight and continues routing decisions to the founder. The new hire retains the title and loses the role.

What to settle before the search

Four things, all of which are cheaper to resolve before a candidate is in the room than after.

• The result. One sentence, twelve months out, specific enough that both sides would agree afterwards whether it happened.
• The authority. Written explicitly: what they can spend, who they can hire and let go, what they can change without asking, and the short list of decisions that still come back to the founder.
• What the founder stops doing. Named activities, with a date. If nothing appears on this list, the company is hiring support rather than leadership, and it should recruit for that instead, at a different price.
• How the organisation will be told. Not an announcement of the arrival, but a clear statement of what now runs through the new person. Ambiguity here is filled in by the existing hierarchy, always in favour of the status quo.

The first three months

The instinct of a good senior hire is to arrive and demonstrate value quickly, and the instinct of the company is to let them, because that is what they were hired for. Both instincts produce the same failure: a visible change made before the person understands why things are as they are, followed by a quiet loss of credibility when it turns out there was a reason.

The pattern that works better is unfashionable. Spend the first month understanding, in writing, and share what you find. Make one change in the second month, chosen because it is genuinely small and highly visible, and complete it. Then start on the real work. The point of the small early change is not the change. It is the evidence that this person finishes what they begin, which is the only currency they have before results arrive.

Knowing whether it is working

The honest early indicator is not revenue, which lags, and not the founder's comfort, which is misleading in both directions. It is where problems go. Three months in, when something goes wrong in the new person's area, does the organisation take it to them, or does it still take it to the founder?

If problems still route around the hire, the appointment has not happened yet, whatever the contract says. That is fixable in month three. It is very rarely fixable in month nine.