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by fractional People Director Ben Birchall
Most businesses recruit in good faith. They identify a need, write a job description, go to market and try to find the best person available. The process feels rational. And yet, in the businesses I work with, the same patterns come up repeatedly; patterns that make recruiting harder, slower and more expensive than it needs to be, and that sometimes result in the wrong hire even when everything looked right on paper.
None of these are failures of effort. They are mostly habits, ways of doing things that made sense at an earlier stage of growth or in a more stable environment, that have not kept pace with how much has changed. Recognising them is the first step to doing things differently.
Hiring for the business you have today
When a vacancy arises, the natural instinct is to fill it. There is a gap, it is causing pain, and the solution is to find someone who can address that gap as quickly as possible. The job description gets written around the current problem, the brief goes out, and the process is under way before anyone has asked the more important question: is this actually the role the business needs, given where it is heading?
In a fast-growing business, the gap between where you are now and where you will be in eighteen months can be significant. A hire made purely for today’s requirements may be a reasonable fit for the next six months and struggling by month twelve, not because they are not capable, but because the context around them has shifted. The businesses that recruit well spend time before the process starts making sure the role they are hiring for is the role the business will need, not just the one it currently has.
Replacing like-for-like
A senior person leaves and the default response is to find someone who looks broadly similar. Same title, same remit, roughly the same background. The logic is that the role is understood and the task is simply to find the right person to fill it. It feels efficient.
The problem is that growing businesses are rarely the same organisation they were when the previous person was hired. The team has changed, the challenges have changed, the level of complexity has increased. A role that existed two years ago may need to be fundamentally redesigned rather than simply backfilled. Some of the most valuable recruiting conversations I have with clients start not with a brief for a replacement, but with the question: if we were building this function from scratch today, what would it actually look like?
Treating experience as a proxy for capability
Years in the industry. Recognisable employer names on a CV. Sector-specific knowledge. These are the things that traditionally make a candidate look strong, and they are definitely not irrelevant. But in an environment where the pace of change is accelerating, they are increasingly insufficient as the primary criteria for a hiring decision.
Adaptability, learning agility and the ability to operate effectively in conditions of uncertainty are often stronger predictors of success in a growing business than a profile that looks impressive on paper. Someone who has spent fifteen years in a stable environment at a large organisation may have excellent technical knowledge and very little capacity for the ambiguity and pace that a scale-up generates. The candidate who looks slightly less experienced but has demonstrably grown through challenge may ultimately be a better fit. The interview process needs to be designed to surface that distinction, not just to verify credentials.
“The most successful organisations are planning for capability, not just capacity.”
Workforce planning that stops at headcount
In most businesses, workforce planning means counting vacancies and budgeting for them. How many people do we need to hire this year? What will it cost? That is a necessary exercise, but it is not really planning; it is accounting. The strategic question, which capabilities will the business need over the next two to three years, and how will it develop, acquire or redeploy them, tends not to get asked until the gap is already painful.
This matters more now than it did five years ago, partly because the pace of change is faster and partly because AI and automation are actively reshaping which roles create value and which are being absorbed into technology. A business that is not thinking about how its workforce needs to evolve is likely to find itself either over-resourced in areas that are contracting or under-equipped in areas that are growing, sometimes both simultaneously. Building that thinking into how the business plans, at leadership level and regularly, is one of the higher-value things a people strategy can do.
The AI recruitment paradox
There is a newer pattern emerging that is worth paying attention to. Candidates are increasingly using AI tools to apply for roles at volume, generating tailored CVs and cover letters at a pace and scale that would have been impossible even two years ago. On the other side, many businesses are using automated screening tools to manage the volume of applications, filtering by keyword and ranking profiles algorithmically. The result is a process in which two AI systems are, in effect, talking to each other, while the humans on both sides are increasingly removed from the early stages of the conversation.
The practical consequences are significant. A role that attracted 500 applications in a morning, many from candidates who could not recall applying, is not generating 500 genuine expressions of interest; it is generating noise. And a screening process that selects from that noise algorithmically is not necessarily surfacing the best candidates; it is surfacing the candidates whose AI tools best matched the keywords in the job description.
Underneath this is a more fundamental problem: many job descriptions are themselves inaccurate. They have been written in a hurry, copied from a previous version, or inflated to attract candidates rather than to describe the role accurately. When an overblown job description meets an AI-generated application, the mismatch between what is advertised and what is real gets baked into the process from the very beginning.
The businesses navigating this well are the ones investing time in clarity before they go to market: a precise, honest account of what the role actually involves and what good looks like in the person doing it. That rigour at the front end makes every subsequent stage of the process faster, more accurate and considerably less frustrating for everyone involved.
“Businesses that align workforce strategy with business strategy will outperform those that treat recruitment reactively.”
What joins the dots?
What connects all of these patterns is the same underlying issue: recruitment treated as a reactive exercise rather than a strategic one. When a hire is driven purely by an immediate need, without reference to where the business is heading, what capabilities it will need, and what the role should genuinely look like, the conditions for a good outcome are already compromised before the process has started.
The good news is that none of this requires a large HR function or a complicated process to put right. It requires a relatively small amount of strategic thinking, held at the right level, before the vacancy goes live. The businesses that build that discipline tend to hire better, move faster, and spend considerably less time and money fixing decisions that were made under pressure.
If your business could benefit from an experienced look at how you attract and retain great people, please call us on 0345 646 5201 or email [email protected]. We would be delighted to work with you to unlock your business’ full potential.
Ben Birchall, Fractional People Director