The short version:
Replacement hires fail for the same reason the last person did because most leaders aren’t hiring for a job. They’re correcting for the person who just left. The fix is to define the standard the role has to meet before writing the req, and to say out loud how the job has changed since the last person took it.
Thirty years ago, a new boss sat me down for a performance review.
What she said next, I still repeat to clients today.
“I don’t think you’re meeting my expectations. Although I’m not sure I ever told you what they were.”
The person saying it had replaced my boss. Which is the entire point. The standard had changed and nobody told me.
Give her credit for the second sentence. Most leaders never say that part out loud. They just act on it.
I thought about that review again last week. A number of readers wrote to me after my last piece on whether to coach a struggling leader or let them go. Several admitted they’d set someone up to fail.
I believed them. I didn’t believe their diagnosis.
Every one of them put the failure in how they managed the person. Not enough feedback. Too much rope, or too little. Expectations nobody said out loud.
The damage was done earlier than that. It was done the day they decided who to hire.
Why does the second hire fail the same way the first one did?
Because the second hire was chosen as a correction to the first, not as a match for the job. Each swing overshoots, and the cycle repeats every eighteen months.
Picture the leader who last held the seat you’re filling. Call that one the deliberator. Too cautious. Sat on decisions. Waited for a consensus that never came.
So you hired the opposite. Call this one the closer.
The closer turns out to be reckless. Runs over two people in the first quarter and loses a client by March. Now you’re eighteen months and a search fee into the same conversation, and you already know what you’ll look for next. Someone balanced. Someone collaborative.
You’ll get a caretaker, and you’ll be back here in another two years.
That’s not a hiring problem. That’s a pendulum, and you’re the one pushing it.
What’s the difference between a hiring standard and a complaint?
A standard describes what the job must produce. A complaint describes what the last person did badly. In a hiring conversation the two sound identical, which is why so many companies hire against the second one without noticing.
You never wrote down what the job actually requires. You wrote down what annoyed you about the person who had it.
One is a standard. The other is a complaint with a candidate profile attached.
The tell is easy to hear if you listen for it. Sit in your next debrief and count how many sentences about the finalist are comparative. Stronger than. More decisive than. Won’t repeat what the deliberator did.
When the benchmark is a person instead of a standard, you’re not evaluating a candidate. You’re relitigating your last disappointment.
Why do good leaders fail when expectations change?
Because the expectations change privately. The role gets revised in the boss’s head, the revision never reaches the person doing the job, and they spend a year working against a target only one of you can see.
The job description on file describes a job that no longer exists. You already know that.
You revised it. In your head. It shifted in month four when the market moved, or when you lost patience, or when you finally admitted what you actually wanted from the role. You started measuring against the new version immediately.
You never wrote the revision down. You never told the person doing the job.
Then you conclude they weren’t the right fit.
They might not have been. But you’ll never know, because they were never told what they were being judged on.
The person who reviewed me at least knew she had never told me. That kind of honesty is rare. It also arrived a year too late to be useful to either of us.
What does a repeated bad hire actually cost a company?
More than the search fee. The larger cost is that the organization learns the standard is unstable, and people stop making decisions in order to avoid being on the wrong side of it.
Your organization is watching the pendulum swing.
They see that the last leader was pushed out for being cautious and the new one was hired for being aggressive. They draw the obvious conclusion. The standard here is whatever the boss is currently irritated by.
So your best people stop making decisions and start reading you. That’s how a fast company turns slow, and no exit interview will ever tell you it happened.
What questions should you ask before replacing someone?
Four, answered in writing, with the hiring leader in the room, before the req is posted.
Describe the job without mentioning the person who left. If you can’t get through it without a comparison, you’re hiring against a ghost, and the ghost wins.
What does this role need to produce eighteen months from now that it doesn’t produce today? Hire against that. Not against last year’s deliverables and not against last year’s frustration.
What are the three outcomes this person owns, and what authority comes with each one? When accountability and authority don’t match, no candidate on earth fixes it. That gap stalls more capable leaders than any skill gap I’ve seen, and it belongs to you.
What would the last two people in this job say it was like to report to you? Not what you hope they’d say. What they’d tell a peer over a drink. That answer is the largest variable in whether your next hire works, and it’s the one nobody has ever measured.
Why can’t leaders assess what they’re like to work for?
Because the only available evidence comes from people who report to them and who edit it before it arrives. It is a structural blind spot, not a failure of self-awareness.
Three of those questions you can answer at your desk. Not the fourth.
The answer to that one isn’t in your head. It sits in other people’s.
Every read you have on what you’re like to work for arrives secondhand, from people with a stake in how you take it. It’s arithmetic. You are the only person in the company who can’t observe you.
You’ll be tempted to go ask them yourself. Do that and you’ll get an answer. Don’t mistake it for the truth.
People who report to you will be polite. Not because they lack nerve, but because they’re doing math about their mortgage and you’re the variable in it. The more direct your question, the more careful their answer.
Confidentiality isn’t a courtesy in that conversation. It’s the instrument. I run these interviews for a living, and the version someone gives with their name attached and the version they give without it are not the same document. They aren’t close.
The talent is not the problem
The talent is out there. I meet them every week. What isn’t out there is a person who can succeed against a target only one of you can see.
I’ve been the person in that chair. Three decades later I still use that review with clients, as the cleanest example I own of what not to do.
Fix the standard. Then find the person. In that order.
About to replace someone, or wondering whether you should?
Call me before you post the req. Not eighteen months from now, when the next one hasn’t worked out either.
One conversation will tell you whether you’re hiring for a job or against a ghost. If it’s the ghost, we’ll talk about what it takes to find out what your people actually think.
If the deeper problem is that you keep hiring instead of building a bench, that is the subject of my book Evergreen Talent:
Prefer to reach me directly? roberta@matusonconsulting.com
