The second biggest hiring mistake I see is to hire for the eventual future — but not to create the future from the current reality. I see this mostly when hiring managers and senior staff. Here are some examples:
- A CTO knows he needs a program manager to manage multiple releases and release operations, so he hires a very expensive, highly seasoned program manager. The problem? The highly experienced program manager is managing only one project and one operations person. The development staff can't take the program manager's rigidity and rebel, making sure the organization only has one project at at ime. The CTO didn't consider how fitting into the team (hiring mistake #3) would change the program manager's role. The program manager is frustrated and bored out of his mind within a couple of months and is back out looking for a job, gone within a year.
- A senior manager is looking for a senior QA person. Not just someone who'll run the test group, but someone to collect metrics on projects, who can be a peer to the engineering managers. Eventually, the senior manager thinks the process and the metrics will be so ingrained that all he'll need is senior test manager. (I don't know why he thinks this, but he does.) So, he hires a senior test manager. This person is great at test strategy-in-the-small — project by project — but is not able to articulate a vision of testing and metrics for the enterprise. The other engineering managers lose respect for the test manager, the company loses face in the marketplace due to a large public defect, and the test manager is fired.
- An established organization wants to create a new product to replace the current flagship product. Thte VP can't stand the current architect or the senior designers, so he hires a new architect, handing off the new product development to that person, keeping the current senior architect and senior designers on maintenance of the old product, because they're too valuable to lose to the new product (and he wants them to leave eventually). But the new architect doesn't understand why some decisions in the current product were made — so he makes some bad decisions. The existing architect and senior designers leave because they aren't working on the new product. The people who are left can't maintain the old product, nor can they create the new one.
Creating a new future is difficult — possibly the most difficult position a new hire can be in. Hiring managers need to balance the need to create a strategy and act on it, along with the tactical deliverables they already have. Finding someone who can meet the current needs is more important than hiring someone who can only perform the future role. You might even need two different people, one now and someone else later. (But maybe you can coach the person into performing the eventual role.) Always make sure you hire the person who can create the future by working in the present.