Hidden Risks of Hiring

The moment your open req hits the airwaves, in addition to the mountain of resumes coming your way through every nook and cranny, the accompanying signal gets louder: We need more execution, so we need more hands to do it. 

Maybe it’s in response to things being harder than they should be within your marketing workflow. Maybe it’s because sales is asking for more in their outspoken cadence of urgency. Maybe it’s in response to an over-stretched marketing team saying “this work/life balance is not only not sustainable it’s making us want to flee and live in the forest.”

(It’s rarely that last one, though.)

So, up goes the job listing and in comes the new hire. Sometimes, when done right – it’s a strong, capable marketer, too! One who knows how to run campaigns, and build programs. One who manages channels like a boss and activates.

A straight up, no-nonsense “doer.”

And for a while… that feels so good. Feels like progress! Activities are up and emails are out. This looks like momentum.

But.

There’s always a but, you’ve read enough of these by now to know that was coming.

But… something else is happening at the same time as this flurry of execution. It’s quiet, but it’s obvious: clarity goes down down down.

And there it is: The problem was never a lack of execution. It was a lack of direction. When you hire “doers” into a system that isn’t clearly defined, you don’t get alignment, you get interpretation.

Each of those strong, capable marketers answers the same questions in different ways:

• What are we actually trying to drive?

• Who are we trying to reach?

• What counts as success?

• Where does marketing stop and sales begin?

No answer is inherently wrong… hopefully. It’s jus that no one is operating from the same system. So instead of building momentum, you get fragmentation. And a growing realization that there’s even less understanding of what’s working.

Execution without direction never scales. It just expands the inconsistency faster.

Now the instinct is to fix the problem the same way it started: “We need better execution.” Or: “We need different people.” But the real shift isn’t more doing, it’s defining the system those people operate inside.

What does the GTM motion actually look like? How is pipeline created, measured, and trusted? What is the lifecycle we’re designing around? Where are the handoffs, and who owns them?

Answer those, make those clear… or every new hire is just increasing your complexity and making execution even tougher than before you fired up your Indeed account. Most companies don’t get this wrong because they’re careless. They get it wrong because activity feels like progress.

Therein lies the rub; the risk often feels like you might make the wrong hire. What’s riskier is hiring the right ones… before you’ve given them something coherent to build upon.