You've just made a hire you felt confident about. Strong CV, solid interview, good references, everything pointed in the right direction. Six weeks later, something feels off. The output isn't quite there, the team isn't gelling, and you're quietly beginning to wonder whether you made the right decision.
It's a situation a lot of hiring managers will recognise, and in well-run businesses it happens more often than anyone cares to admit. In a lot of cases it can be a problem with the process rather than the candidate.
A CV is, at its core, a carefully curated document. It shows you what someone has chosen to present and nothing more. What it can't tell you is how they think under pressure, how they'll navigate a difficult colleague, or whether they'll genuinely settle into your particular way of working. If your hiring process doesn't look beyond it, you're making a significant decision on limited information.
The most common mistake isn't hiring someone unqualified, but hiring someone whose credentials were entirely genuine, but whose motivations, working style, or values weren't well suited to the role or the business. A candidate who thrived in a fast-paced agency may find a more structured environment frustrating. Performance is never just about ability; it's about ability within a particular set of conditions, and a CV rarely tells you what those conditions were.
According to Leadership IQ's study of 20,000 new hires across 312 organisations, 89% of those who didn't work out within 18 months failed because of attitude, motivation, or interpersonal issues rather than any technical shortcoming. Yet most hiring processes remain heavily weighted towards technical assessment, and that imbalance is precisely where things tend to unravel.
The warning signs most processes overlook
They're nearly always present, the difficulty is that when you're under pressure to fill a role, it's rather easy to explain them away.
Responsibilities without results
A CV heavy on duties and light on outcomes is worth scrutinising carefully. Candidates who have genuinely made a difference tend to describe what changed because of their involvement, call handling times cut from five minutes to two, debtor days reduced from 45 to 28, a process that previously required three people now running with one. Those who are less forthcoming tend to describe what they were responsible for, without ever quite landing on what they actually achieved.
Polished in interview, less so in practice
Some candidates are exceptionally well-prepared for structured interviews. They know the language, they've rehearsed their examples, and they come across very well indeed. It's worth remembering that this is a fairly narrow skill set. Probe beneath the prepared answers with follow-up questions they won't have anticipated. How someone responds when the script runs out is considerably more revealing than the polished answer that preceded it.
Motivation that doesn't bear scrutiny
When you ask a candidate why they want this particular role at this particular company, listen carefully to whether the answer holds up. Genuine enthusiasm is specific, considered, and remains consistent when you press on it.
How they speak about previous employers
A consistent pattern of negativity about past managers, teams, or company culture, however subtly expressed, is one of the more reliable indicators in any hiring process. People who are unable to reflect honestly on their own part in previous difficulties tend to carry that pattern with them.
What a more considered hiring process looks like
Businesses that hire well consistently don't leave it to instinct, they use a process that encourages genuine evaluation rather than first impressions. That means asking the same questions of every candidate and scoring responses consistently, so comparisons are meaningful rather than impressionistic. It means being clear about your culture and ways of working, then assessing candidates against those realities rather than assuming things will sort themselves out once someone is through the door. It also means bringing in the people who will work alongside the new hire, because colleagues often notice things that a hiring manager focused primarily on skills and experience might not.
Above all, it means being honest about what the role genuinely demands day-to-day, not simply what reads well in a job description. When the brief is clear and grounded in reality, it becomes considerably easier to assess whether someone is actually suited to it.
The cost of getting it wrong
Recruiting again takes time and money, and the gap in productivity whilst a role sits empty affects the wider team. The management hours spent trying to make a struggling hire work are rarely insignificant, and the effect on team morale, rarely captured in any budget, is real and tends to linger. Set against all of that, the investment in a more thorough process at the outset is a fraction of the cost of having to do it again.
At Jobwise, we help businesses across the North West find people who don't just look right on paper, but genuinely fit the role, the team, and the organisation. We take time to properly understand what you need before we begin, so that when we put someone in front of you, you can be confident they're worth your time.
If your current process isn't giving you that confidence, we'd be glad to have a conversation.
