The Hiring Tree

Careless hiring is the quiet killer of company culture, and most leaders do not realize they are doing it until the layoffs start.

Here is what it looks like. You grow headcount fast because it looks good in a board deck or an investor update. Nobody asks whether the business can sustain those roles in twelve months. Then the growth story stalls, and the fix is a percentage cut across the bottom of the org chart.

A guest on our podcast this week put it better than I could. "Growth for the purpose of growth alone is not healthy for an organization."

If you are scaling right now, run this test before your next requisition goes out. Could you sustain this role if growth flattened for a year? If the honest answer is no, you are not hiring, you are borrowing against a future layoff.

We got into this and six other ideas with 22 year HR veteran Brit Davies on this week's episode of Podcast.

Full breakdown is on the blog: https://thehiringtreebook.com/home/f/careless-hiring-is-fueling-the-layoff-cycle-heres-the-fix
Listen to the episode here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ep-57-careless-hiring-skinwalker-ranch-and-britt/id1819622195?i=1000776753632

Nobody teaches you how to manage people when you start a business.

You figure out your product. You figure out your sales process. You figure out your finances.

But people? You kind of just... wing it.
A lot of small business owners I speak with say they go with "their gut" all the time.

But the "gut" is hardly a predictor of success.

You hire someone who seems good. You learn as you go. You handle situations as they come up. You make some mistakes you don't fully understand at the time.

And then one day you have 30, 40, 50 people working for you, and you realize you've built a company on top of a people strategy that was designed for five.

The job postings are inconsistent. The onboarding is different for every person. Performance conversations occur when something goes wrong, not as a regular practice. Your employee handbook hasn't been updated since 2019.

Maybe you don't even have a handbook.

None of this is a character flaw. It's a natural consequence of building fast without a dedicated people function.

The owners I respect most are the ones who can look at their business honestly and say, "We've outgrown what we built. Time to catch up."

Where's the biggest gap in your people process right now?

The cost of replacing an employee is something most owners feel, but few ever actually calculate that cost.

Here's a rough number to sit with:

Replacing a $60,000 employee typically costs between $45,000 and $90,000 when you account for recruiting time, lost productivity during the gap, training, the learning curve, and the impact on the team left behind.

That's not a consulting firm statistic designed to scare you. That's just what happens when someone who knows your business, your clients, and your systems walks out the door.

Most of those departures were preventable, though.

Not all of them. Sometimes people outgrow a role, or life takes them elsewhere. But the ones that sting? The ones where your gut told you the person wasn't engaged six months before they left?

Those are almost always a systems failure before they're a people failure.

Unclear expectations. No development path. A benefits package that made them feel like a cost center instead of an investment.

Retention isn't about ping pong tables. It's about making people feel like they're somewhere worth staying.

What's one thing your best employee would say you could do better?