Two leaders. Same company. Same talent market. Same open roles.

Opposite results eighteen months later.

One kept losing people he fought to hire. The other built a team with a waiting list.

Here is what separated them, and what many leaders miss, especially in technical roles.

Let’s call the first leader Brian. He ran a growing mechanical engineering team. Every time a seat opened, he moved fast. Screened the resume. Overvalued academics and familiar company names as proxies for "good." Asked a few FMEA and ANSYS questions. Extended offers.

His logic sounded reasonable. "I need people who can do the work."

Brian hired six engineers in 18 months. Three quit inside the first year. He fired one. Of the two who stayed, one was disengaged. Add up the agency fees, the lost productivity, and the drag on the people who stuck around, and those four misses bled his org of roughly $400K. A conservative tally.

Susan was the other leader. Same roles, different product line. Same budget. Over the same 18 months, Susan hired four mechanical engineers. Two years later, all four were still there and thriving. Two had been promoted. She had a running list of engineers from other teams who wanted in.

The gap was not sourcing. Not compensation. Not luck.

Susan ran a play Brian never ran. She interviewed for alignment and “culture add.”

She asked how candidates preferred to get feedback. She asked what kind of environment brought out their best work. She introduced them to the team as she walked them out, watching the room. She was honest about the ugly parts of the job, not to scare anyone off, but because she wanted the role to be right for the candidate too.

Brian screened purely for skill. Susan screened for culture and skill. One team churned. The other compounded.

This is not a squishy opinion. It is in the data.

LeadershipIQ ran a three-year study of 5,247 hiring managers who hired more than 20,000 people. Forty-six percent of new hires failed within 18 months.

Nearly half.

Here’s what leaders like Brian should know. Only 11% failed for lack of technical skills. The other 89% failed for reasons skill never measures: coachability, emotional intelligence, motivation, temperament.

Read that again. Nearly nine out of ten failed hires were chosen for their skill and lost for everything skill alone doesn’t tell you.

Why smart leaders keep making this mistake.
An empty seat hurts. The work piles onto the people still there, and every week the pressure to fill it grows. So leaders take shortcuts. They use schools and past employers as proxies for good.

"He must be smart if he went there."

"They would not have hired him if he weren't strong."

You have heard "hire fast, fire slow." That is terrible advice.

Hire intentionally and fire fast. Follow Susan on the hire. Then the minute you know it is not working, move. Drag out that call and the performance loops crush everyone involved.

A fast bad hire is slower than a patient good one. Every failed hire resets the clock, reopens the req, and burns the trust of the team who watched it happen.

Brian was not moving fast. He was moving the same distance over and over.

Your homework this week.
Pull up your last three hires. For each one, answer honestly:

If the only honest answer is "they had the skills," that is your pattern. Your next hire is where you break it.

Before that next interview, write down two questions with nothing to do with the resume. One about how they like to be led. One about where they do their best work. Ask both. Then listen more than you talk.

Missed the setup?
This story picks up where last week left off. If you did not read it, start there: The Interview Was Over Before It Started.

Next week.
We’ve now spent three weeks looking at others. Next week I hand you the mirror. A five-question Talent Scorecard you grade yourself on in three minutes. It will show you where your blind spots are on building and keeping a top team.

Some will score higher than expected. Some will not.

Either way, you will know.

Go get 'em! 🚀

—Brenden
#GSD