0:00 A study from Leadership IQ found that forty-six percent of all new hires fail within eighteen months.0:06 And here’s the part that always gets me—eighty-nine percent of those failures aren’t because of technical skill.0:14 They fail because of attitude.0:16 Motivation.0:17 The stuff you can’t really see on a resume.0:20 Right.0:20 It’s the stuff you feel in your gut during the interview and then decide to ignore.0:26 We have absolutely been there.0:28 That one hire… you know the one I’m talking about.0:31 Oh, I know the one.0:32 It felt like we were finally getting ahead, like we were on the verge of breaking through, and we thought, "One more key person, and we're there." We were drowning.0:44 Orders were coming in, the team was stretched thin, and we needed a senior person to just… take a piece of the business off our plate.0:53 We didn't even have a perfect title for it.0:56 Head of Growth?0:57 Head of Operations?0:58 We just needed a grown-up.1:00 We needed a savior.1:01 And that’s the first mistake.1:03 You can't hire a savior.1:05 You have to hire a builder.1:06 It’s the exact trap Candice Bannister fell into with her cupcake company.1:11 She was growing so fast she just rushed to fill seats, and it nearly sank her.1:17 And our guy, on paper, he was perfect.1:19 He’d worked at two companies we admired, he talked a great game, he knew all the acronyms.1:25 In the interview, he was just… so polished.1:28 He had an answer for everything.1:30 He did.1:31 And we were so impressed by the answers that we forgot to ask the right questions.1:37 We never once asked, "Tell me about a time a project you led went completely off the rails.1:43 What did you do?" We never asked about failure.1:46 We just asked about his wins.1:48 And the red flag I completely ignored?1:50 He never once said "we." It was always "I." "I grew revenue by 300%." "I launched this product." It was never "My team and I." That’s exactly it.2:00 We were hiring for a leader, but we were interviewing an individual contributor with a big title.2:07 We didn’t define the behaviors we needed.2:10 We just had a list of skills.2:12 And the first thirty days… it started so subtly.2:15 It was just… a weird energy.2:17 He’d agree to a deadline in a team meeting, and then the day would come and he'd have a dozen reasons why it wasn't done.2:25 And they were always someone else's fault.2:28 The data wasn't clean, the junior analyst didn't get him what he needed… And our best people, the ones who always delivered, they started getting quiet.2:38 You could see them having to work around him.2:41 They’d stop including him on email chains because it was just faster to do it themselves.2:47 That’s when the silent losses start.2:50 Hold on—what do you mean by silent losses?2:53 The U.S.2:53 Department of Labor says a bad hire costs at least thirty percent of their first-year salary.2:59 But that’s just the visible part.3:02 The founder of Ned Capital, Adrian Lawrence, calls the other stuff "cash erosion." It's the wasted management hours, the slowed projects, the tarnished trust.3:12 It doesn't show up on a payroll line.3:15 It shows up on your calendar.3:17 I remember that feeling in my stomach when I’d see a one-on-one with him pop up.3:22 Just a complete energy drop.3:24 Because I knew the entire conversation would be me trying to hold him accountable and him tap-dancing around the real issues.3:33 You spend more time managing around the person than you do building the company.3:38 That’s the real cost.3:40 It’s not the salary.3:41 It’s your time.3:42 It’s your focus.3:43 It’s the drag on the entire organization.3:46 We were becoming the bottleneck because we were spending half our week dealing with the fallout from one person.3:53 And the rest of the team sees it!3:56 They see you tolerating it.3:58 And that erodes their trust in you.4:00 They start to wonder, "Do the founders even see what's happening?" Or worse, "Is this the new standard here?" That’s the cultural damage.4:09 One person can absolutely change the energy of the whole room.4:13 It took us...4:14 what, six months to finally act?4:17 Six months.4:17 And every single one of those months we paid twice.4:21 Once for his salary, and again in lost productivity and morale from everyone else who had to clean up his messes.4:28 The final conversation was awful.4:31 Just brutal.4:31 It was.4:32 But the feeling in the office the next day… was relief.4:36 It was like a storm cloud had lifted.4:38 And that’s when we said, "Never again." So what did we actually change?4:43 Because it wasn't just about being more careful.4:46 We built a whole new system.4:48 We did.4:49 First, we got incredibly clear on the behaviors we wanted before we even wrote the job description.4:55 Things like "takes ownership" and "shows generosity with credit." We started interviewing for those things specifically.5:04 The paid trial project was the biggest game-changer.5:07 We stopped asking people what they would do and started paying them to actually do a small, defined piece of work.5:15 It takes a week, maybe two.5:17 But you learn more in that one week than you do in five rounds of interviews.5:22 One hundred percent.5:23 You see how they communicate in Slack.5:26 You see how they handle feedback.5:28 You see if they ask for help or if they just spin their wheels.5:32 You can’t fake that.5:34 Remember Buffer?5:35 They hired so fast their payroll hit eighty percent of their costs, and they had to do massive layoffs.5:42 They learned they had to slow down and be deliberate.5:45 And we started doing real reference checks.5:48 Not just calling the numbers they give you.5:51 We’d find people on LinkedIn who worked with them two jobs ago and ask one simple question: "Would you enthusiastically rehire this person?" The hesitation in their voice tells you everything you need to know.6:05 That’s the data.6:06 It’s not what they say, it’s how long they pause before they say it.6:11 It feels like so much extra work upfront.6:14 The trial project, the back-channel references, the structured interviews… it probably adds two weeks to the hiring process.6:22 It adds two weeks to the process to save you six months of pain.6:27 The math on that is undeniable.6:29 We learned the hard way that hiring fast is the slowest way to build a great company.6:35 You end up having to re-do the work.6:37 Just look at Klarna—they replaced hundreds of support staff with an AI, then had to start rehiring because the quality plummeted.6:46 There's no shortcut.6:47 So the lesson for any founder listening is that the most expensive mistake you can make isn't a bad marketing campaign or a flawed product feature.6:57 It's the person you let onto the team who doesn't belong there.7:01 And the problem is rarely their skills.7:04 The problem is who they are when the pressure is on.7:08 You have to design a process that reveals that before you make an offer.7:12 I still think about it sometimes.7:15 Do you think there was any way to save that situation?7:18 To coach him into being the person we needed?7:21 No.7:22 I think the mistake was made the second we sent the offer letter.7:26 We hired the person we saw in the interview, but that person never actually showed up for work.
