Hire Slowly, Fire Fast

It's not a nice story to start a post with but it's an important one. She'd handed in her notice at a job she'd held for six years, giddy and excited about a step up the ladder and a new place to contribute to.

She told her partner over dinner, told her mum, who was delighted, and rearranged the school run and the commute and the whole schedule of a family's week around this better title and a fresh start. Three weeks after she walked in, she was called into a room and told, kindly enough by the nervous HR business partner, that it wasn't working out. It's just not quite going to plan.

No reason she could really pin down was offered as an explanation. Just a quick decision, quickly reversed, done through the probation period with little legal challenge. And now she was driving down the motorway in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, working out how she'd explain it at the same dinner table where, a month earlier, it had all sounded like a positive lift to life.

I think about people like my friend whenever someone offers the advice "hire fast, fire fast." It turns up everywhere in management writing, and it always arrives with passion – as ambition and courage and decisiveness: fill the seats quickly, cut anyone who doesn't work out just as quickly, keep the machine moving. Bold. Decisive. Alpha. The vocabulary of a person who gets things done.

Here's the part worth playing with though. I'm not convinced it's brave at all. It seems more like a lazy option with a false label attached — and, more often than not, it quietly descends into something worse: hire fast, drop standards, keep them anyway.

The standard I'd argue for is much more humane and much harder to hold to. Hire slowly. Fire fast. Not because firing is ever easy, but because avoiding it when it's genuinely needed is worse for everyone – most of all the person being avoided.

The front part is where most of the harm is done, because a fast hire is almost never fast for the person living it. They leave something stable. They take the risk, rearrange a life, tell the people they love that things are looking up, give up a level of security their life may have been organised around. They walk in trying to prove themselves, and weeks later they walk back out – a dent on the CV, a knock to the confidence, a stretch of uncertainty they hadn't expected. Every job carries risk, of course. But when you hire quickly without ever defining what success looks like, or the real shape of the role, you're not being efficient. You're gambling with someone else's livelihood – and they, not the organisation, pay the emotional bill.

None of which makes firing a strategy. It's a last resort, and even inside a probation period it's never painless. There's the practical side of it – the process, the handovers, the reshuffling, the technical IT support – and beneath that the human impact: shame, shock, anxiety, relief and grief, often all at once.

Paul Hawken put it about as neatly as anyone in Growing a Business:

"Firing is failure. Everybody is at fault. The best way to avoid firing people is to hire well in the first place."
– Paul Hawken

Firing should never be Plan A. But pretending a poor fit will sort itself out isn't kindness either. It's avoidance, and avoidance always comes with a tax. Because a team doesn't merely watch people come and go – it absorbs it. When colleagues arrive and vanish, everyone left behind starts asking the same question: am I next? And that question changes how people show up and how they contribute to the business.

A team under an unspoken threat stops taking sensible risks, stops challenging the assumption in the room, stops speaking up, stops putting themselves into the work, and gets on with the personally protective business of protecting themselves. Once fear is part of the air, real performance becomes very hard to find. What people need isn't comfort, or a quiet life – it's a sense of stability: the confidence that if they do good work and add something to the place, they won't be moved on because someone higher up made a hasty call and now needs to correct it.

A poor hire doesn't stay contained, either. Standards slip. Good colleagues grow weary of carrying the slack and dealing with the mistakes. Customers meet a different level of quality than they expect. And the manager, who ought to be building the team's ability and backing the people already doing well, disappears instead into the daily task of performance management. Seen that way, hiring slowly isn't bureaucracy or old thinking – it's protection: for the team's momentum, for the culture you're trying to grow, and for the organisation's ultimate goal – the ability to turn its ideas into something valuable.

It helps, too, to remember that people take time to be effective and productive, and that this isn't a fault. Not everyone hits the ground running. Some need context, some need clearer direction, some simply need a while to learn the real system — the unwritten rules, the relationships, the constraints the job description didn't mention. The "fire fast" reflex breeds lazy management: we stop developing people, stop coaching them, stop looking for what they might become, stop seeing their potential. We stop asking whether the role, the expectations, or the system were ever designed well enough to give anyone a fair shot – and simply cycle through candidates until someone happens to survive the conditions we built. Often enough, someone who gets labelled a bad hire is really a capable person trying to succeed in a vague role with unclear expectations, in a system that isn't truly built to help people contribute above the basic tasks. That isn't theirs to own. It's a management problem.

And the real costs of getting this wrong doesn't show up on a spreadsheet. Hiring is expensive in the visible ways – the recruiters, the interview hours, the onboarding and kit and training. Firing costs something different and harder to see: lost momentum, a break down in trust, a manager's attention swallowed for weeks, and the message clearly received by everyone watching. Every hour spent managing poor performance is an hour not spent building capability, or backing the people already doing well and deserving of more support and attention. Good hiring is not really a recruiting task. It's a leadership one – and it pays back, or charges interest, for a long time after the decision is made.

Your team reads all of it, too. A careless hiring process says something very specific to the people already there: that standards are negotiable, that the place makes bets with people's lives, that fitting in is mostly a matter of luck or who you know. A careful one says the opposite – that the team is worth protecting, that standards are real and upheld, and that whoever joins next was chosen with the same care they were. High standards don't intimidate good people; they reassure them. They're a signal that you're serious about the environment you're building, and that they were right to join it.

The final irony is that "hire fast, fire fast" so rarely delivers even the fast firing it promises. The hard conversation often gets ducked. People get moved sideways rather than addressed. Teams bloat a person at a time until they cost a fortune and restructure is needed to "remove the bottom 10%" rather than simply dealing with previous low performance. The high performers, who notice all of this with uncomfortable clarity and instinct, begin to find somewhere with higher standards — and average quietly becomes the new normal, which is desperately hard to reverse once it sets.

Acting decisively when something genuinely isn't working, with clear communication, a fair process, and genuine care for the person on the other side of the table isn't harshness. It's honesty, and it's far kinder than months of wandering performance that everyone can feel and no one will do anything about.

So: hire slowly, fire fast. In practice the first half means treating a hire as a decision rather than a race – naming what success actually looks like before the first interview, weighing behaviour at least as heavily as skill (behavioural questions tell you far more than hypothetical ones), and respecting a candidate's time, because the good ones are assessing you too. And the second half means that when it truly isn't working – after the coaching, the honest feedback, and a fair attempt at putting it right – you act quickly and humanely, rather than letting low performance become resentment on both sides.

You won't always get it right; no one does. But getting it right far more often, and handling the exceptions with clarity and genuine care, is how strong teams are actually built – one carefully made decision at a time. The woman driving home that Tuesday deserved a decision made with that much care. So does everyone you'll ever hire, and everyone you'll ever have to let go.