Hiring for the team you will have in eighteen months
Most hiring decisions are made against today’s gap. The good ones are made against the shape the team is about to become.
The instinct when a team is under pressure is to hire for the gap in front of you. The backlog is full of a particular kind of work, so you look for someone who has done exactly that. It is an understandable reflex and it produces teams that are excellent at the problem they had last year.
The more useful question is what the team will need to be good at once the current work is finished — which, on any reasonable hiring timeline, is roughly when the new person becomes productive.
The compounding effect of shape
Teams have a shape: the distribution of depth and breadth, the number of people who can operate without supervision, how much of the system exists in exactly one person’s head. Every hire changes that shape, and the changes compound in ways individual hiring decisions rarely account for.
Hire three specialists into a team of four and you have created three dependencies rather than three capabilities. Hire only generalists and you will find, at the worst possible moment, that nobody can go deep enough on the thing that is failing.
Questions worth asking before opening a requisition
- What will this team be responsible for in eighteen months, and does this hire move us toward that or merely relieve today?
- Which parts of our system have exactly one person who understands them, and does this hire reduce that number?
- Are we hiring for a gap or for a bottleneck? A gap is missing capability; a bottleneck is a person everything queues behind, and they need different solutions.
- What is the ratio of people who need direction to people who can set it, and which way is this hire moving it?
- Could this be solved without a permanent hire — by augmenting for a defined period, or by redistributing ownership? Not every gap warrants headcount, and headcount is the hardest decision to reverse.
On seniority
Senior hires are commonly justified on throughput, which undersells them. Their real contribution is reducing the decision load on everyone else — fewer escalations, fewer designs that need rework, fewer questions that stall for a day. A team where several people can be trusted with an ambiguous problem moves at a different speed from one where every judgement routes through the same two individuals.
That effect is invisible in a headcount plan and is usually the difference between a team that scales and one that merely grows.
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