You are four months short and about to hire the wrong person

The role has been open since the spring. You have taken part of it on yourself, your two strongest people absorbed the rest, and the work is still slipping. Four CVs came through last week and one of them is a maybe.

By now you are barely assessing anyone. You are looking for a reason to stop looking, which is a different activity and tends to produce a different hire.

None of that makes you careless. The pressure is real and it has been running for months. It is worth knowing what it has done to your judgement before you make an offer. When did you last turn somebody down for this job?

Who is paying for the empty seat

Add it up honestly. The cover arrangement everyone agreed to for six weeks is in its fourth month. Two people are carrying a job and a half, and you are picking up the parts nobody else can take, most of it after six o'clock.

That cost is real and you feel it every week. The second one arrives later and lands on exactly the same people. A hire who does not work out has to be trained by the team already covering, and when it ends you are recruiting again with a more tired group than you have today.

There is something to do in the meantime that most managers skip. What has your team actually stopped doing while you are short? Decide it deliberately and tell your own boss what it is. Absorbing the whole gap in silence teaches the business that the vacancy costs nothing.

You have started selling instead of interviewing

Look back at the last conversation you had with a candidate. Who talked more? You spent the first twenty minutes on how good the team is. When they raised something about the travel you answered it before they had finished the sentence. Walking back to your desk afterwards, you found yourself explaining away the weakest thing they said.

That is what wanting it to work does to a manager. Try a plainer test. If you were fully staffed and under no pressure at all, would you still want this person on your team? If the answer is no, what you are buying is relief, and relief wears off in about a month.

Hire for the year you are about to have

Most job descriptions describe an ideal person rather than the work. Before the next interview, write down what this person will really spend their first year doing, in rough proportions. Half of it might be rebuilding a process nobody has owned since the last reorganisation. A good part of the rest might be client calls your team currently queues up for you.

Now you have something to test against. Ask about what has already happened rather than what might. Tell me about the last time you took over a process in a mess. What state was it in, and what did it look like six months later? Then follow up twice on whatever they skate past.

Hypothetical questions mostly reward people who are quick on their feet. Is that central to this job, or beside the point? Decide before you build an interview around it.

Ask the question you have been avoiding

There is usually one worry you have not put to the candidate. They have never managed anyone and this job manages four. They are coming from an organisation ten times your size, where somebody else did the parts that will now be theirs. You know exactly what yours is. Why has it stayed out of the room?

Raise it plainly. Name the concern and ask them to talk you through it. Some will have thought about it more carefully than you have and will say so with evidence. Others will be offended that you asked, and that reaction is worth watching, because you will have to say harder things in their first year.

Let them spend real time with whoever will work alongside them most closely. Afterwards, ask that colleague what they would still want to know before an offer went out, rather than whether they liked the person. Liking is easy to produce in an hour. Doubt usually attaches to something specific, and the specific thing is what you want.

If you get it wrong, do not spend a year hoping

You will get one wrong eventually. Everybody who hires does, because you are deciding on a few hours of evidence about how somebody will behave over years.

Most of the damage happens after you already know. Managers often see it by week six and do something about it around month nine, and that gap costs more than the original decision did.

Be fair about your own part first. Plenty of hires later described as mistakes were never told what good looked like here. Did this person get a proper first month and honest feedback early enough to use it? If not, that is yours to fix, and quickly.

If it is still wrong after that, act while the probation period is live. It is kinder then than it will be next summer, for them more than for you. An empty seat is a problem you are already managing. The wrong person in it is a problem you hand to everyone who covered for you, and at the end of it the seat is empty again.