What Goes Wrong with Hiring in a Small Business?

There is too much work in the company. The manager concludes that they need another person. A job ad is written, candidates are reviewed, the best one is chosen, and everyone hopes things will get easier.

A few months later, the manager is still overloaded. The new employee is overloaded too. Some work is left undone, some has to be redone, and no one can quite tell whether the problem is the person or the way the work is organised.

The question usually asked in this situation is: “Did we choose the wrong person?” I would ask something else first: did we even know what work we were choosing a person for?

The cost of a bad hire starts long before hiring

In a 2017 US survey, 74% of employers said they had hired the wrong person for a position. That does not mean 74% of all hires were wrong, but it shows how familiar this experience is to managers. A more recent 2026 US survey of workers showed the other side: 86% of those who had been in their current role for less than a year had already applied for another job. These are different surveys of different groups, but both point to the same question: how do an employer and an employee reach a situation so quickly where neither is getting what they expected? [1][2]

Replacing someone looks expensive to a manager. They have to search again, train someone, redistribute the work and risk making another mistake. So people often put up with the situation. Meanwhile, every month brings the cost of unclear tasks, repeated guidance, unused strengths and extra work for the manager. That cost does not always appear on any invoice.

One job ad can describe four different jobs

At Sparkly, we have analysed more than 12,000 job ads. Our observation is that many combine at least two different roles; some include tasks that could call for four or five quite different work profiles. This is a finding from our analysis, not a representative estimate of the whole labour market.

For example, one person may be expected to come up with new ideas and patiently maintain routines, win new customers and produce detailed reports, listen to people and consistently monitor processes. A person may be able to do several things. The question is whether they can do all of them well every day, with a reasonable amount of energy, and in the proportions the company needs.

A job ad is often a list of things that are currently not getting done. A list is not yet a role. If we put every unfinished task on one person's shoulders, we hire the problem and carry it forward.

This is especially painful in a small business

A large company may have enough work in one specific area to hire a dedicated person. A small business may need the same work for only a few hours a week. Other kinds of tasks are added to fill the rest of the role.

That is how an “all-rounder” role is created—one that can be hard to fill with someone who does everything equally well. It does not mean employees in small businesses are less capable. It means the work has to be assembled more thoughtfully when there is less of it: assign some tasks to existing people, automate some, outsource some, and only then decide what kind of person is still needed.

There is another difficulty. If the strategy is unclear, processes depend on the manager's memory, and responsibilities have not been agreed, one new person will not fix all of that. They inherit the confusion, and eventually are judged by how well they tolerate it.

We turn our own people into mediocre performers

A manager sees an employee struggle with some tasks and concludes that the employee is ineffective. Sometimes the problem really is a skill gap or a lack of ownership. But sometimes we have given a capable person work that requires them to go against their natural way of working every day.

They get the work done, but slowly. They keep checking themselves, avoid some tasks or run out of energy before the day ends. At the same time, their strongest ability may go almost unused in the company. We can turn our own people into mediocre performers and then start looking for “better” people in the market.

A person is more than a personality type, and no test on its own can tell us where they belong. Skills, experience, interests, working conditions and how the team actually works together also matter. Gallup's research has found a link between using one's strengths every day, higher engagement and better performance. That is reason enough to ask whether our current division of work helps people use their strengths. [3]

What should we actually do? Start with the outcome, then get to the person

We will not solve this problem with another test that tells us who the “right” person is. First, we need to understand what the company is trying to achieve, what work leads to that outcome and where the work is currently getting stuck. Only then does it make sense to assess people or open a new vacancy.

1. Define the expected outcome, actual work, workload and existing team strengths before hiring again. Not “we need a marketer”, but, for example, “we need a certain number of qualified sales conversations each month”. Not “we need an operations manager”, but “orders need to go out on time without the owner having to resolve every exception”. If the outcome is not defined, we cannot know whether the role will solve the problem at all.
2. Map the path that produces the outcome. Which processes need to work? Who gives input to whom? Which decisions are waiting on the manager? Where does work stop, repeat or land on the wrong person's desk? If a process is missing, a salary cannot replace it. Otherwise, the new employee simply becomes another person who keeps asking the manager what to do next.
3. Write down the actual work, not the job titles. For every recurring task, note its purpose, frequency, approximate time required, skill needed and decision-making authority. Also separate work that requires deep focus, fast communication, attention to detail, creativity or tolerance for routine. This reveals whether one “role” actually contains several different kinds of work.
4. Check the workload. Perhaps the company needs four hours of financial analysis a week, twenty hours of customer communication and one temporary project to organise its processes. That does not automatically add up to one full-time role. If we simply bundle the tasks together, we are paying a salary for the hope that one candidate fits three different roles.
5. Look at the existing team before hiring. Who is doing work that they are good at? Who is spending a disproportionate amount of energy on a task someone else could do better? Which abilities are already in the company but going unused? Check this against actual work, results and conversations with the people involved. A personality or work-style assessment can help us ask questions, but it does not replace demonstrating job skills or listening to what the person wants.
6. Redesign the work. Only now decide what stays with whom in the team, what can be taught, which process needs improvement, what can be automated and what makes sense to outsource as a service. Sometimes this removes the need to hire altogether. Sometimes a much clearer and smaller need remains.
7. If you still need to hire, define a new role from that work. The job ad should make clear what the person will mainly do, what outcome they are responsible for and which additional tasks are truly unavoidable. Compare candidates against predefined, job-related criteria. Give finalists a comparable work task and ask them the same substantive questions. The assessment should help inform the decision, not make it on their behalf.
8. After the person starts, check whether the assumption was right. Agree on what they should be able to do after 30, 60 and 90 days. If the result is not there, look separately at whether the gap is a skill, a clear process, guidance, a suitable division of work or enough work volume. Otherwise, we will call a system failure a people problem again and start the whole cycle over.

Where does Sparkly help?

Sparkly helps make this work visible and manageable. A company's goals, processes, tasks and roles can be linked; then the requirements of the work can be compared with the team's existing skills and ways of working to see which parts of the need are still uncovered. Instead of hiring one new person, a manager can compare several real options: change how tasks are divided, improve a process, use external help or hire for clearly defined work.

AI can help organise work descriptions, spot contradictions and work through options quickly. But only if the brief is right. If we give a system a vague ad saying “we are looking for someone who can do everything”, AI will simply help us process the wrong question faster. The manager makes and is responsible for decisions about people.

You can start with one bottleneck or one role. We do not need to rebuild the whole company before we can find out whether the next step is another person or a better way for the people already there to work together.

Before the next hire, make one honest decision

People apply for jobs, among other reasons, to earn a living and find work that suits them. A company hires so that a needed outcome gets delivered. Those goals can meet when both sides know what the work actually involves. If they do not, the company pays a salary for hope and calls the disappointment that follows a bad hire.

We do not have to repeat this pattern for another ten years. If your company has hired more people but the manager's workload and bottlenecks have not gone away, come talk to Sparkly. We will look at one specific role or team and work out whether you need another person, a clearer process or a division of work that better fits the strengths of the people you already have.

The most expensive question is not “who should we hire?” The most expensive thing is failing to ask, “what work do we actually need to get done?”

Sources and notes

1. CareerBuilder US employer survey, 7 Dec 2017: 74% of surveyed employers said they had hired the wrong person. Survey summary.
2. isolved, Voice of the Workforce (US, 2026; 1,330 workers): 86% of workers who had been in their current role for less than 12 months had applied for another job; 58% of all respondents planned to apply within the next year. Survey results.
3. Gallup, How Employees' Strengths Make Your Company Stronger: links between using strengths, engagement and performance. Article.