In short: Better hiring starts by defining the business outcome and the actual work. Then assess a person's skills, motivation and fit with the specific team. AI can accelerate a sound process, but it cannot fix an unclear brief.
If a leader has only ever seen average results, how can they know that better is possible? How can they ask their next employee for something they have never experienced?
That is when a person starts to look like a cost. An obligation. Someone who must be paid and whose work must be checked. And AI suddenly looks like the only possible way to gain leverage.
I see it the other way around. People are a company's greatest source of leverage. AI can accelerate that leverage. But only when the person is in the right role, on the right team and in the right environment.
I do not consider myself unique or extreme. I am simply a persistently critical optimizer and fixer of processes. My background is in IT and building companies. That is why I see hiring primarily as a business process. And frankly, I am surprised by how little we talk about the quality of that process.
Why do we keep accepting the same mistake?
In a 2012 CareerBuilder survey, 69% of the US employers surveyed said a bad hire had negatively affected their business in the previous year. In 2017, 74% of employers said they had hired at least one wrong person. In a 2017 survey by the UK's Recruitment & Employment Confederation, as many as 85% of HR decision makers had had that experience.
These figures do not mean that three out of four hires fail. They show how widespread the experience of a bad hire is among employers. To me, that is already a serious enough signal.
More recent research gives us little reason to be satisfied. In Totaljobs' 2025 UK study of 624 recruiters and 1,009 jobseekers, only around 30% of recruiters said they had received quality applications in their most recent hiring process. At the same time, 69% of jobseekers found the expectations in job ads unclear. These are not bad-hire rates, but they do show that the problem often begins long before candidates are assessed.
What bothers me most is that we see the problem, yet often try to fix the wrong part of the process.
If we run faster, where will we end up?
I have been following hiring practices and training in Estonia lately. There are excellent specialists who look at the whole process. But too often the focus is on using AI to write job ads, sort CVs, rank candidates and draft emails faster.
All of these can be useful tools. There is just one question: what are we doing faster, and towards what result?
IT has an old, simple rule: crap in, crap out. If the input is wrong, a good tool cannot be expected to produce the right result.
If the brief is unclear, AI gets the unclear work done faster. If the job ad describes the wrong role, it reaches more people faster. If candidates are assessed against the wrong criteria, we simply get the wrong rankings faster.
And then we wonder why 200, 300 or 400 people applied and we still cannot find the right one.
I would ask instead: are the candidates really the problem? Or did we tell them the wrong thing about whom we were looking for and why?
Hiring does not start with a job title. It starts with the work.
The brief usually sounds something like this: we need a sales manager, a marketing specialist, a project manager or a customer service representative.
But that is a job title. It is not a description of the need.
I would start with different questions:
- What business outcome do we need to achieve? What is not working well enough today?
- What specific tasks are needed to achieve that outcome? What does the work actually involve, beyond a polished job description?
- Which of those tasks can the existing team handle? Is someone doing work they dislike while another person would do it well and gladly?
- What is genuinely missing after we improve how the work is organized? Perhaps we do not need a new employee at all. Or perhaps we need someone quite different from the person we first imagined.
- What environment will the new person enter? What are the leader's management style, the team's pace, communication habits, values, openness and working relationships?
- What kind of person do those tasks actually require? Not just someone who can do the job, but someone who wants to do this work, can grow in this environment and helps others improve.
- How will we check that before making a decision? Through real work situations, thoughtful questions, demonstrated skills and a substantial conversation about fit.
Only then does it make sense to define the role, write the ad and choose a channel for reaching that person.
Channel choice and wording are critical too. But they cannot be the starting point when we do not yet know whom we really need.
We are not looking for someone pleasant. We are looking for someone who joins, stays and creates value.
A candidate can have an excellent CV, be a pleasure to talk to and be a very strong specialist. And still be the wrong choice for this particular job.
Perhaps the pace does not suit them. Perhaps they need more autonomy than the leader can offer. Perhaps their ways of working clash. Perhaps we promised a strategic role, while the actual work is mostly routine execution.
Does that make the person bad? No. Often the context or the promise was wrong.
Cultural fit must not mean looking for people like ourselves. We also need different ways of thinking and complementary strengths. The question is whether people can work together, trust one another, resolve disagreements and create the intended outcome.
It is just as important to be honest about the work itself. We should not sell someone a job title and hope they get used to the real tasks later.
First, we talk about what the person will actually have to do. Then we talk about what they may be able to do in the future.
Skills can be taught. Motivation and fit cannot be reshaped indefinitely.
If I need someone who can arrive tomorrow with an established client network and proven ways of working to deliver sales results, I look for an experienced specialist. In that case, prior experience is part of the value they bring.
If I have time to develop someone, I can look for a beginner with enormous potential. And a beginner does not have to be 22 years old. They could be a 45-year-old career changer who simply has not yet had the chance to use their strengths in the right place.
Those are two different briefs. Neither is inherently better.
People can develop, learn and be guided. In one sense, they are like modelling clay, but only up to a point. If the work consistently conflicts with their motivation, natural working style or values, no onboarding programme will solve that.
Potential cannot be assessed reliably from a pleasant first impression alone. We need several complementary perspectives and evidence related to the actual work. If a leader has strong business instincts but is less skilled at assessing people, they should involve someone whose strength is understanding people. If a recruiter understands people well but cannot see the business process as a whole, the leader needs to explain it.
No one has to do everything alone. But together, the team must build a complete picture.
What does a rushed mistake cost?
It is worth considering a simple risk scenario.
If we assume that only one in four hires succeeds and each attempt costs the equivalent of four months' salary, four attempts add up to 16 months' salary. This is a thought experiment, not a statistical conclusion from the studies cited above. Actual success rates and costs depend on the role and the company.
Even with more modest assumptions, the question is painful. Hiring costs more than the ad and the interviews: the leader's time, colleagues' time, onboarding, work left undone, lost clients, extra pressure on the team and, eventually, having to repeat the whole process. Gallup estimates that the total cost of replacing an employee can range from half to twice their annual salary.
It is especially costly when the person who leaves could have become an exceptionally strong employee in the right environment.
This is not a criticism of recruiters. It is a call for better collaboration.
I do not think recruiters should be expected to understand an entire company's business model, management culture, inefficient processes and interpersonal dynamics on their own.
That is not one person's job.
But I do believe that good hiring needs all of that expertise represented. A recruiter must be able to ask for a good brief. A leader must be able to provide one. Where needed, bring in someone who sees the business processes as a whole and someone who can assess work-related behaviour and how people collaborate.
Some people have a naturally sharp instinct for reading businesses and people. Others develop it through long experience and deliberate learning. Either way, it matters to know your limits and add complementary strengths to the team.
No assessment method offers complete certainty. But that is no reason to skip important steps. Quite the opposite: each step should reduce a specific risk.
And when the new person starts, responsibility does not end with a signed contract. The promised work, actual management, ways of working and onboarding must support the fit we looked for while hiring.
Mediocrity is not inevitable
I do not believe exceptional people are a tiny elite we must search for with a magnifying glass.
I believe exceptional performance can emerge in many different people when they are given the right task, the right responsibility, the right team and a chance to use their strengths.
At the same time, no one is exceptional in every role. That is precisely why the groundwork before hiring must be thorough.
We do not need someone just to fill an empty chair. We need someone who creates value, makes the team stronger and can use new tools in ways that help the company grow.
AI can help us do mediocre activities faster and faster. But exceptional results still depend on a person who understands what has value and can decide what is worth doing in the first place.
That is why, for me, the most important question in hiring is not: “How do we find our next employee faster?”
It is this:
“Do we know precisely enough what kind of person we need, for what real work, and have we created the conditions in which they can do exceptionally well?”
If the answer is no, the sensible first step is not to speed up hiring. It is to get the groundwork right.
Because doing exactly the same thing faster cannot be expected to produce a better result.
— Mikk Orglaan