Short answer: Usually a frequency mismatch: their pace and way of deciding didn't match yours. They did well where they came from because that environment supported how they work, with structure, teams and time. Your company works differently, and nobody tested for that difference before the offer.
I'm Vinay Pasricha. I run GoodSpace AI, a hiring company in Noida, and I wrote Organizational Frequency, a book about why good people fail in the wrong places. Few hiring stories are as common, or as painful, as this one.
It's rarely about ability
The story usually goes like this. You hire someone senior from a well-known company. The CV is strong, the interviews go well, and everyone is relieved. Four or five months later, things aren't moving. The person seems slower than you expected, or keeps asking for things you don't have. You start to wonder whether they were ever as good as they looked.
Most of the time they were. Most bad hires are not bad people. They are mismatches. As I put it in the book, most hiring failures are resonance failures disguised as performance failures.
What changes when someone moves from a big company to yours
Every company has a frequency: its pace, its decision style, its tolerance for ambiguity, and the register in which people think and work. A person has one too. Moving from a large company to a smaller one usually changes all four at once:
- Pace. Decisions that took a committee and a month now take a conversation and a day.
- Decision style. They were used to approvals and sign-offs. You expect them to decide and tell you later. Or the other way round.
- Ambiguity. They had a process for everything. You may not have a process yet.
- Register. They led through a team and specialists. You need them to do much of the work themselves.
None of this shows up on a CV. A strong record in a very different environment is a reason to check fit more carefully, not less.
How it could have been caught
The book sets out stages that come before any offer:
- Understand your own frequency. Name your pace, decision style and tolerance for ambiguity in plain words. Until you do, every hire is a guess.
- Discover where the person actually belongs. Ask how they naturally operate, not only what they've done. Have them walk you through a normal week in their last job, and what frustrated them. Someone frustrated by slow approvals may thrive with you. Someone frustrated by a lack of structure may not.
- Validate against the environment, not the role. Give them a real problem from your business, have them meet the actual team, and ask whether they'd do well here, at this stage, with these people.
If they're still with you
Name it early. Check whether there is a better seat for them in your company. If there isn't, part with dignity and help them land somewhere that fits. Then look at how you hired, not just at who you hired. For what waiting costs, read What a Bad Hire Really Costs in India.
One thing to do this week
Before your next senior hire, sit with two people who have done well in your company and write one page: how fast decisions get made, who makes them, how much ambiguity a new person has to live with, and how people disagree. Then try the free Find your organizational frequency self-reflection.
Where this comes from
This answer draws on three stages of Organizational Frequency: Stage i · Understand your own frequency, Stage ii · Discover where the person actually belongs and Stage iii · Validate against the environment, not the role. The book is on Kindle.
To ask about your own hire, describe what happened on Ask Vinay's books.
Vinay Pasricha is the founder of GoodSpace AI and the author of six books, including Organizational Frequency.
