The Hiring Leak | Article 2: The Logic of the Hiring Leak
I used to think that when teams failed, the problem showed up later.
I thought the issues started with poor execution, bad communication, or a lack of motivation. So we added process. We added meetings. We added reviews. And when things still didn’t work, we blamed “culture” or “performance.”
I was wrong.
In many organizations, the system doesn’t fail during execution. It fails much earlier—at the point of entry.
Hiring Is an Input Problem
Every organization is a system. And like any system, its output can only be as good as its input.
If you feed a database corrupted data, you don’t debug the query optimizer.
If you connect a high-performance engine to the wrong fuel, you don’t blame the driver.
Yet that’s exactly what we do with hiring.
We hire people using proxies—résumés, titles, interview answers, confidence—and then we’re surprised when real-world behavior doesn’t match the expectations we attached to those signals.
The system is behaving correctly. It is producing the logical result of what we selected for.
That mismatch is the Hiring Leak.
We Hire for What’s Visible
Hiring happens under pressure. Time is limited. Information is incomplete. So we simplify.
We look for things that are easy to see and easy to compare:
- Where someone worked
- What tools they’ve used
- How confidently they speak
- How quickly they answer questions
- How closely they resemble past “successful” hires
These are not meaningless signals—but they are surface signals.
What actually determines success inside a real organization is mostly invisible:
- Judgment under ambiguity
- Ability to learn in unfamiliar systems
- How someone reacts when they are wrong
- How they handle dependency, disagreement, and uncertainty
Those traits don’t show up cleanly on a résumé.
They don’t perform well in interviews.
They reveal themselves slowly, under real conditions.
So we don’t select for them.
The Interview Is a Simulation — And a Bad One
An interview is not the job. It is a high-stress, artificial simulation.
In that simulation, we often reward:
- Fast recall over deep reasoning
- Confidence over accuracy
- Performance under observation over performance under uncertainty
We don’t mean to. It just happens.
The result is predictable: we hire people who are good at interviews, then ask why they struggle with messy, ambiguous, collaborative work.
That’s not a people problem. It’s a measurement problem.
Downstream Problems Are Often Upstream Decisions
When a hire struggles later, we treat it as a new failure:
- “They don’t take ownership”
- “They don’t collaborate well”
- “They resist feedback”
- “They lack senior judgment”
But often, those traits were never selected for in the first place.
We hired for speed, not patience.
We hired for certainty, not curiosity.
We hired for independence, not coordination.
The organization didn’t drift. It executed the original logic perfectly.
The Most Expensive Leaks Are the Ones You Don’t See
Hiring leaks are dangerous because they stay hidden.
The person isn’t bad. They’re just misaligned with what the system actually needs.
So instead of fixing the input, we compensate downstream:
- More process
- More oversight
- More meetings
- More pressure
That’s how you end up with smart people stuck in slow systems, burning energy just to stay afloat.
The Core Insight
Most organizational problems are treated like runtime errors.
But many of them are compile-time mistakes.
If you want high-performance teams, you can’t just optimize execution. You have to examine what you’re admitting into the system—and why.
The Hiring Leak is not about hiring “better people.”
It’s about hiring with clearer logic.
And yes—how clearly you define roles and how actively you engage the candidate market upstream directly impacts this leak. The rest of this series will explore how we systematically select the wrong signals—and how those small decisions quietly shape everything that comes after.