Published October 29, 2023 · 4 min read

Hiring is drag. Every open role slows the people around it, creates coverage gaps, and pulls your best performers into interviews instead of work. The instinct is to close that gap fast. That instinct is almost always do more harm than good.

I don't think the core problem is not finding enough candidates. There are two fundemental things we need to get right. Knowing what shape your team actually needs and holding out for someone who changes that shape for the better. Obviously, not every hire does that. Some hires shrink the ceiling.

Starting From Small Teams

I love small teams. They are the best scaling strategy I know, because they give you the best seed. A small team lets you see whether the structure actually works before growth starts masking its problems. They are also a design choice. Start small, then grow from there.

When a team is compact, its failure modes stay visible. You know who is carrying weight and who is not. Communication does not need much process because everyone is already in the room. Decisions move faster because there is less consensus to manufacture.

That same logic still holds in bigger organizations. I prefer subteams that stay small enough to own a problem clearly, but can pull in more people when the work truly demands it. Small teams scale well because they can be extended, split, and replicated without losing their shape.

The moment a team grows past the point where every member has a direct line of sight to every other member, complexity starts compounding. Coordination costs rise. Accountability diffuses. Adding a person to fix one problem can easily create three more.

A small team, committed to a cause bigger than themselves, can achieve absolutely anything.

Simon Sinek

Hiring Harmony

New Members

That also changes how I think about hiring. The question worth asking before any hire is not "is this person good?" It is "what does this team look like six months after this person joins?"

A good addition raises the floor. They take something the team does inconsistently and make it reliable. They cover a genuine gap, not a hypothetical one. They disagree in ways that improve decisions rather than stall them.

Fit, in this context, is not about personality or cultural similarity. It is about whether someone's working style, judgment, and strengths are compatible with where the team actually is, not where you hope it will be. Hiring someone who thrives in a well-resourced, high-structure environment into a team still figuring out its own process is a common and expensive mistake.

Strength lies in differences, not in similarities.

Stephen R. Covey

Diversity of background and perspective matters because problems are not one-dimensional. But diversity without a shared standard of rigor produces noise, not insight. The goal is people who think differently and hold each other to the same bar.

Embracing the Unpredictability

Rushed hiring almost always bites the team. If a seat goes open for long, pressure builds, the bar quietly lowers, and someone gets hired who would not have made it through the process two months earlier. That person then becomes the standard by which the next hire is measured.

This is how teams end up in drifting. It is not through one bad decision, but through a sequence of reasonable-seeming compromises made under deadline pressure.

Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

Jim Collins

The counterintuitive position is that an open seat is often better than filling it with the wrong person. A stretched team at least knows it is stretched. The pain is visible, so people can respond to it, even if imperfectly. A weak hire creates a slower kind of damage. Standards drift slowly. Ownership gets muddy. Other people start compensating without naming the problem. By the time the cost is obvious, it is already in the team’s habits.

What Experience Thought Me

Keep recruiting even when your headcount looks full. Offers fall through. People change their minds. Circumstances shift. The pipeline you maintain during quiet periods is the one that saves you when something unexpected opens up.

The real trade-off is not between speed and quality. It is between the short-term pain of an open seat and the long-term cost of the wrong one. The open seat is visible. The damage from a poor hire is not, until it is everywhere.