Are you hiring for today, or building for tomorrow?

Most hiring decisions are made with today in mind. The open seat, the sprint that's slipping, the team that's stretched. That urgency is real, but it's also where most hiring mistakes begin.

The best hires I've seen weren't the ones who filled a gap. They were the ones who changed what the team thought was possible. That doesn't happen by accident. It happens when the people leading the hiring process understand that they're not filling a role; they're shaping a future.

We spend a lot of time optimising job descriptions, interview formats, and scoring rubrics. We spend far less time thinking about who's actually running the process, and how much that person's judgment, biases, and blind spots determine the outcome.

In my experience, the single biggest predictor of a good hire isn't the candidate. It's the quality of the hiring manager leading the evaluation. A senior, experienced manager, someone who knows the team from the inside, who understands what great actually looks like in that context, will make better decisions than a well-intentioned process followed by someone without that depth.

The hiring manager isn't just evaluating a candidate. They're representing everything the team has built, and deciding who gets to be part of what comes next.

Here's something I've noticed: companies that struggle to attract strong candidates are almost always unclear on what they're actually offering. They default to salary, because salary is legible, and underinvest in articulating the other two things that genuinely drive a great candidate's decision.

1. Salary: Fair, competitive, and reflective of what the candidate brings to the table.
2. Project: Not just a role, a place in a story. Where they fit today, and where they could go tomorrow.
3. Growth: Real opportunities to learn, take on new challenges, and advance over time.

Salary gets you in the room. The project, the work itself, the direction, the sense of where this role is going, is what gets a strong candidate excited. And growth is what keeps them. When you can speak clearly and honestly to all three, you stop pitching and start having a real conversation.

The word that matters most here is honestly. Top candidates have seen every version of the polished pitch. What they remember, and what earns their trust, is a hiring manager who tells them the truth, including the parts that are still being figured out.

CVs tell you what someone has accomplished. They tell you almost nothing about how they accomplish it, and that gap is where most hiring decisions go wrong.

I've found it useful to think about behavioural tendencies when evaluating candidates. Not as a categorisation exercise, but as a prompt to ask better questions. The Birkman Colour framework offers a simple lens:

1. Red, Action-oriented: Decisive, hands-on, driven by results. Thrives when moving fast and making things happen.
2. Green, Analytical: Detail-driven, methodical, thoughtful. Brings rigour and depth to complex problems.
3. Blue, Empathetic: People-focused, communicative, collaborative. Builds trust and holds teams together.
4. Yellow, Structured: Organised, process-driven, consistent. Creates clarity and keeps things on track.

The point isn't to label people. It's to build awareness of the team's current makeup, of what's missing, and of how a new person's working style might complement or clash with what's already there. A team of five who all think the same way isn't a strong team. It's a comfortable one.

I want to be direct about this: experience doesn't protect you from bad hiring decisions. In some ways, it makes you more vulnerable to them, because experience comes with patterns, and patterns become habits, and habits become blind spots.

1. Overweighting technical skill: A brilliant engineer who can't collaborate isn't a strong hire; they're a liability. Technical ability and interpersonal capability deserve equal scrutiny every time.
2. Mistaking familiarity for quality: We warm to candidates who think like us. That's human. But it's not the same as them being right for the role, and it's a fast path to building a team with no real diversity of thought.
3. Going it alone: Bringing in a second perspective at the final stage isn't a sign of uncertainty. It's one of the most effective structural checks against bias available to you. Use it.

The best hiring processes don't begin when a seat opens up. They begin with clarity about the team's direction, the role's real scope, and what you're genuinely able to offer someone who joins.

Before any process starts, it's worth having that conversation with the people who have oversight of the team. Not to get approval, but to pressure-test your thinking. Does this hire make sense for where the team is going? Are we being honest about what we're offering? Do we have the right person leading the process?

Answer those questions before the first CV lands, and you'll make better decisions, not because you have better candidates, but because you're clear on what you're actually looking for.