How quickly can it be determined that a new hire isn't working out, and what typically prevents timely action?

Harry Stebbings · Feb 1, 2023

Speed of growth isn't everything — continuous, sustainable 30% growth can be preferable to growing 100%.

Compounding works well, so the important thing is continuity and sustainability rather than peak rate.

Scope: Self-identified as a corrective to his own momentum/hypergrowth investing bias

13:03 20VC: From $57M in ARR to $297M in Just 12 Months; Why Speed of Execution is the Most Important Factor to Success, Hiring 2,000 People in 3 Years Remotely & Secondaries; Why, When and How Much To Take Out with Alex Bouaziz, Co-Founder & CEO @ Deel

Alex Bouaziz · Feb 1, 2023

When you know a hire is wrong you should cut them immediately rather than give them months to figure it out, however strong their resume

He let a known-bad hire run a couple months too long and it nearly caused a showstopper on a key product given the speed the company was iterating at

Scope: especially in a fast-iterating company

39:00 20VC: From $57M in ARR to $297M in Just 12 Months; Why Speed of Execution is the Most Important Factor to Success, Hiring 2,000 People in 3 Years Remotely & Secondaries; Why, When and How Much To Take Out with Alex Bouaziz, Co-Founder & CEO @ Deel

Annie Pearl · Feb 3, 2023

The most common founder mistake in product hiring is not the bad hire itself but taking too long to recognize and act on it

Delay is very expensive for the hiring manager, unfair to the candidate who would likely succeed elsewhere, and demoralizing to a team that would otherwise be inspired by strong teammates

Scope: speaker says she has made this mistake herself many times

49:25 20Product: When to Hire a CPO, The Three Different Types of CPO, How To Know What You Need, How To Structure the Hiring Process, What Are the Must-Ask Questions, What Tests and Case Studies Should Be Used, How Should Their Compensation Package Be Structur

TJ Parker · Jun 5, 2023

The only way to get hiring accuracy above 90% is to be fast at admitting a hire is wrong and replacing them, not to be better at picking

Even the best hiring managers are only right ~70% of the time, so the leverage is in changing your mind quickly rather than in selection

12:24 20VC: The Largest Venture Backed D2C Consumer Exit; PillPack: $0-$300M Revenues in 5 Years & The Biggest Lessons Scaling the B2B Business to $300M in 2.5 Years with TJ Parker, Co-Founder @ PillPack

Kevin Systrom · Feb 22, 2023 · hedged

In a small startup you can tell very quickly in a working scenario whether someone will work out, so a founder's goal is to sharpen fast detection before hiring rather than absorb churn later

Detecting fit early saves both sides the pain of a hard change, analogous to how little signal humans need to judge a song

Scope: there is a middle ground of ambiguous cases; specific to small startups

42:43 20VC: Instagram Founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger on Why Social Networks Should Be Less Social & The Next Wave of Social | Why San Francisco Will Return with a Vengeance and The Future For Remote Work | Let's Get Personal: Relationships to Money, Be

Elias Torres · Mar 21, 2025

You can tell within the first week or two that a hire isn't good enough — most managers get the signals and reject them — and you should act on it that fast

The signals are there early; people simply refuse to see them

34:59 20VC: Selling Drift for $1.2BN is the Biggest Failure: What No One Tells You About Selling Your Company | Why Incumbents Are Slower & Worse Than Ever | Why the Most Valuable Companies in a World of AI Will Not Have More Than 100 People with Elias Torres

Shardul Shah · Sep 16, 2024

The biggest mistake first-time founders make is not firing fast enough

47:11 20VC: Index's Shardul Shah on Why Market Size is a Trap | Biggest Lessons on Pricing from Leading Rounds in Wiz & Datadog | Why Benchmarks & Averages in VC are BS | How Index Makes Decisions and Why Growth & Early are the Same Investing Style

Fabien Pinckaers · Feb 12, 2025

You can tell within six months or less that a hire isn't working; the real bottleneck is young team leaders being unwilling to act on it

Nobody wants to dismiss someone, so acting is hard even though the problem is quickly visible

30:01 20VC: The $5BN Company Built from the Belgian Countryside | The Story of Odoo: The Company with No Plans to Sell, IPO & Their Billionaire Founder Who Does Not Care About Money with Fabien Pinckaers, Founder & CEO @ Odoo

Guillaume Cabane · Nov 29, 2023

A bad growth hire becomes obvious very quickly, because they won't try aggressive, out-of-the-box things

Growth is fundamentally about aggressive creativity, so a candidate who defaults to running ads and talking about the product reveals themselves fast

51:55 Lack of aggressive out of the box experimentation reveals a bad growth hire quickly

Kipp Bodnar · Sep 28, 2022

You know it's time to let someone go when you have been clear on the goal, agreed expectations and a timeframe with them, and they have not progressed — and the progress signal is usually visible within a month or two.

Within a month or two you can see whether someone is on the progressive path or whether the job is fundamentally wrong for them and they care about something the organization doesn't need.

36:58 Visible within a month or two once goals and timeframe are agreed upfront

Larry Shurtz · May 10, 2024

A bad sales hire is identified not by one incident but by the combination of several red flags

Early signals like failing to absorb account prep or misrepresenting the company story are red flags, and you can draw conclusions from customer interactions, but you have to double-click rather than judge on one data point

24:59 Pattern of red flags not single incident identifies a bad hire

Mike Shebat · Nov 27, 2023

The biggest cultural mistake in scaling is hiring the wrong person and failing to correct them quickly

An uncorrected off-culture hire goes on to hire ten more people like themselves, compounding into a real problem

27:04 Uncorrected off culture hires compound by hiring more like themselves

Emilie Choi · Aug 23, 2021

If a new hire hasn't shipped something meaningful in the first thirty days, they're probably not a fit and should be managed out

Coinbase's founding cultural norm from Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam was shipping code in week one; the company wants action over strategic frameworks and up-to-speed periods

37:53 No meaningful shipped output in first thirty days signals a bad fit