Why Your Rushed Senior Hire Keeps Failing

You've decided to bring in a senior person. An MD. A COO. Maybe even a CEO to sit above the whole thing.

The plan is to lighten the load, build a leadership team, put some capability at the top of the business that isn't you.

And you want them starting a week on Monday.

The Faster the Role Matters, the Faster You Rush It

Here's what I see again and again, and it never stops surprising me.

The more senior the role, the more agency founders sprint through the hire. As if speed were a virtue. Get them in, point them at the chaos, stop the bleeding.

You wouldn't buy a building after a ten-minute walk round. You wouldn't marry someone after one dinner. But the person you're about to hand a slice of your company to? One interview and a gut feeling over a flat white.

Think about everything you're actually trying to find out.

Are they a cultural fit? Do they value what you value? Will they make the right call when it's three in the morning and a client is threatening to walk? Will they know which plates to spin in the good months and which completely different plates to spin when it all goes sideways?

Are they commercial? Can they lead? Can they communicate without leaving a trail of bruised egos behind them?

Will they add value... or become one more thing you're quietly carrying?

None of that shows up in sixty minutes and a friendly chat by the lift. You already know this. You do it anyway.

Lengthy Is Not the Same as Drawn Out

People hear "long hiring process" and picture something painful. Three weeks of radio silence between stages. Candidates ghosted. Everyone frustrated.

That's drawn out. That's just bad admin.

Lengthy is different. Lengthy is a process with enough surface area that you can actually see the person before you commit.

And the ones worth hiring like it.

In my experience, serious candidates are drawn to the agency that takes the hire seriously. They've been burned by rushed processes too. It's the candidate pushing to have it wrapped up by Friday who should be making the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

What "Full" Actually Looks Like

So if an hour won't cut it, what does a proper process look like? Here's the shape I'd steal.

Start with a red flag call. Not an interview. A short video call to hear them speak, let them ask questions, tell them about the business. You're really only answering one thing in your own head. Would I be comfortable leaving my kids with this person? They're about to take responsibility inside something you built.

Then a proper interview. Same questions, asked the same way, to every candidate, scored on paper. Because left to instinct you'll lob soft questions at the person you're magnetically drawn to and grill the one you aren't. Consistency is the only way to compare like with like.

Run values through all of it. List your organisational values and keep testing against them. Something like the People Analyzer from EOS works well here. It doesn't matter how impressive the CV is. Misalignment at the top creates dissonance, makes waves, breeds bad apples, and lands the whole problem right back on your desk.

Give them the reverse interview. Ask for three pages on where the business could go and what it should do to get there. Not months of work. But to write it, they have to interview you. Ninety minutes in a room, them asking, you answering. You get to watch how they think, what they probe, what they do with what you tell them. Then they present it back, and now you've seen the communicator too.

Bring in the team. A workshop or a Q&A built around that strategy piece. They interview your people, your people interview them. You get a 360 view instead of just your own reflection.

Do the chemistry test. Two hours, dinner, a couple of drinks. The final sense-check on values and culture. Your gut either confirms it or it doesn't.

And get an outside read. A 45-minute call with your chair, a NED, a mastermind peer, another founder whose judgement you rate. Someone with no skin in the game telling you plainly what they see.

The Part You Want to Skip

Look back at that list. Between them, those stages test culture, values, experience, credibility, judgement and communication. Your gut gets satisfied and the rational boxes get ticked.

It takes weeks. Multiple meetings. It is, without question, the least convenient thing on your plate right now.

It's also the exact reason your last senior hire didn't work.

You skipped it once. You told yourself this one felt different. And six months later you were managing them instead of being freed by them.

If you want a sharper lens on the senior hires that actually change an agency, that's the kind of thing we pull apart every week over at gyda.co.

So before you fire off that offer to stop the bleeding, one question.

What exactly are you buying with the three weeks you're trying to save?