News & Insights

Two answers, every time. Capital. And people.

The capital conversation gets all the airtime: interest rates, lender appetite, what the next 18 months look like for middle-market deal flow. The people conversation gets nodded at and tabled. Which is strange, because every operator we know will tell you the same thing when pressed. It only takes a handful of bad hires in critical seats to undo a year of operational gains. They drive the best people out. They drag the team’s standard down to their own. And the damage shows up two quarters later, in numbers no one initially attributes to a hire.

The people problem is not that great operators do not exist. They do. The problem is where most companies are looking for them, and who they are asking to do the looking.

The Wrong SpecialistYou Wouldn’t Set Your Own Broken Leg

Cut your finger? Grab a bandage. That is what internal resources are for.

Break your leg? You do not pull up YouTube. You go to the ER and ask for an orthopedic surgeon, someone who has done this a thousand times and does not have to think about it.

So why would you hand a mission-critical hire to a general job board, or pile it onto an HR team that is already running benefits, payroll, compliance, employee relations, and three open requisitions on the operations side?

Asking them to also run a director-or-above search, to map the regional competitor landscape, identify the passive candidates who are not applying anywhere, build relationships with people who will not return a cold InMail, and pressure-test a finalist’s cultural fit against your specific operating environment, is asking them to do a sixth full-time job in their spare time.

They are talented professionals. They are not surgeons. And the pressure to “just get it filled” leads to the same outcome almost every time: a hire that looked right on paper, did not take, and cost more on the way out than the search would have on the way in.

The Real MathWhat a Bad Hire Actually Costs

The damage is not a line item. It is a system effect.

And here is the hidden cost most owners miss. Every month a critical seat sits open or under-performing, the next-best candidate in the market gets one month closer to accepting somewhere else. The cost of doing nothing is not zero. It is the silent loss of the person who would have actually solved the problem.

The StandardFront-Load the Effort, or Pay for It Later

The best hiring advice has not changed. Put the rigor in before the offer, not after.

That means a real candidate pool, not the four resumes that came in through the posting. It means an evaluation process that pressure-tests cultural fit and operational instinct, not just credentials. And for the seats where the stakes are high, the ones requiring specific industry experience, specialized skill sets, or relationships you cannot manufacture in 90 days, it means bringing in someone who lives in that market every day.

Not a generalist. A firm that knows the LBM landscape, knows the candidates who are not visible on LinkedIn, knows the difference between a resume that looks right and a person who will still be performing at 24 months.

The argument is not that internal recruiting is wrong. It is that a brain surgeon and a triage nurse have different jobs, and pretending otherwise costs you the patient.

Before your next critical hire, ask one question. If this person is still in the seat 24 months from now, performing at the level we need, what will we have done differently in this search? If you cannot answer that question, you are not running a search. You are running a posting.

Your people are your competitive advantage. The ones you don’t hire are too.