Strategic Hiring for SMEs | What thinking do you do before you hire?

Most businesses don’t hire badly. They hire late. And when you don't have a hiring strategy, "late" becomes the default.

By the time the vacancy exists and the pain is acute enough to force action, the thinking that should have happened months earlier hasn’t happened at all. The brief gets written under pressure, for the problem that exists right now. The person you hire is solving last year’s problem in next year’s business.

Eighteen months in, you wonder why it doesn’t quite fit. It's one of the most common problems I see in growing SMEs and small businesses. It's a team design problem, not a recruitment problem. 

The result, over time, is what I call the Frankenstein’s monster problem. A team that wasn’t designed, it was accumulated. Each hire made sense in the moment but nobody was thinking about how all the pieces would eventually fit together. There’s overlap that creates friction and confusion. Gaps nobody noticed until something fell through them. A structure that creaks under the weight of where you’re actually trying to go.

The fix isn't usually to replace people. It's strategic hiring thinking, and most businesses skip it.  It comes down to two things. First, design your organisation intentionally. Second, design your ideal person before you go looking for them.

Think of it like fishing. You wouldn’t sit on a dock with any old rod and any old bait and hope the right fish swims by and takes a bite. That’s essentially what reactive team building looks like. The thinking I’m talking about is choosing your spot, selecting your equipment, knowing exactly what you’re fishing for and what bait they like before you even cast a line.

Part one: team design before you hire - why organisational design matters

The most useful hiring thinking happens before the vacancy even exists.

That means considering what you’re trying to achieve, strategically, in the next two to three years. It involves understanding what your team needs to look like to get there. Not just in terms of headcount, but capability, attitude, dynamic and how people complement each other.

If it’s a senior hire you’re considering, it also means thinking about you. What are your strengths and what gaps need plugging or complementing? What part of your role would you love some help with? What’s your leadership style and what style would take the team to the next level?

Where are the genuine gaps between what you have now and what you’ll need? Which of those gaps are critical and could start to limit growth at a predictable point? Which are irritating but manageable?

This is a different conversation to “we need to hire someone.” It’s a strategic conversation about the business, the team and the future. It's organisational design, and it's the foundation of any effective hiring strategy. It produces a very different brief.

Know your hiring triggers before the pain hits

One of the most useful things a growing business can do is identify its hiring triggers in advance.

Not “we’ll hire when it gets painful” or “yikes, someone has left and there’s a gap to fill” because that’s reactive and always late. Instead, know your specific indicators that tell you it’s time. It might be a revenue threshold, a capacity point or a strategic milestone that requires a capability you don’t currently have. It might be a change in business model that changes who your customer is or how you deliver value.

Knowing the trigger in advance means you’re not scrambling when it arrives. The thinking has already been done and the brief exists. You know what you’re looking for and why, and you’ve got time to find the right person rather than the fastest available one.

It also means you can make decisions now that set you up for that hire. Building the conditions a new person will walk into. Addressing the team dynamics that need to shift before a new dynamic is added. This is designing instead of retrofitting, or more accurately, shoehorning.

The hiring questions growing businesses should ask first

For businesses that know they’re growing but aren’t yet sure what that means in practice, this thinking is especially valuable.

You know you’ll need more people. You don’t yet know exactly who, when or in what order. The temptation is to start hiring for the most obvious gaps and figure out the rest as you go.

The businesses that manage growth well tend to do it differently. They sit with the harder questions first. If we hire a head of operations, what will they need to do in six months? In eighteen? What will the team around them look like? What needs to be in place before they arrive for them to actually succeed?

This takes time and it requires a level of honesty about where the business is now, not just where you’d like it to be. It produces a team that was built for where you’re going, not just where you’ve been. Reactive hiring rarely achieves that, and when it does, it’s luck not judgement.

Part two: how to write a person specification, not a wish list

Once the organisational thinking is done, you move from macro to micro. You know what the team needs to look like. Now you need to get specific about who fits into it.

This is where most hiring processes fall down. The brief becomes a list of tasks dressed up as requirements. “Strong communicator, works well under pressure, proactive self-starter.” That could describe half the working population and helps you assess precisely nobody.

A useful brief describes the specific human you need for this role, in this team, at this point in the business, and in twelve months, and in two years. It’s honest about the environment they’re walking into. It considers the pressure points, the culture, the things that will make someone thrive and the things that will grind them down.

It gets into attitude as well as skill. Skills and experience are relatively easy to assess (and fudge on a CV!). Values, ways of working and how someone behaves under pressure are harder to assess, but in most cases they matter more. A technically brilliant person whose values don’t fit the culture will cause more disruption than a slightly less brilliant person who gets it.

I call this the person spec. It’s not the role description. It’s not the task list. And it’s not the advert. It’s the specification of the person who will fit your culture and deliver exactly what you need. You’ll need this to write your job advert well, and you’ll need it to assess candidates properly. Without it, you’re back on the dock with any old rod.

It also addresses attitudinal fit honestly. Instead of “we want someone who shares our values” in the abstract, it asks specifically what does this organisation believe, how does it operate and what kind of person genuinely belongs here?

I always think of a story from my PA Consulting days. There was an aptitude test for a cyber security role. The recruiters had been searching for maths graduates from Russell Group universities. The person who scored highest was a hairdresser. Nobody saw that coming. But the thinking behind the assessment had opened the field on where to look, while simultaneously closing it on what to look for. The person specification made that possible.

The real cost of a bad hire to your team

A bad hire doesn’t just underperform. It changes the team around it.

The wrong person in the wrong role creates friction nobody anticipated. It shifts dynamics. It loads pressure onto the people who were already doing well. It can quietly undermine months of work you’ve done to build trust, alignment and momentum.

And it’s expensive. Research consistently shows a bad hire costs tens of thousands once you factor in recruitment, onboarding and lost productivity. Not just the recruitment fees. The onboarding time. The management attention. The opportunity cost of what that role could have been doing if you’d got it right first time. 

Getting the organisational design right means you’re hiring into a structure that makes sense. Getting the person spec right means you’re finding someone who fits it. Skip either step and you’re essentially hoping the right fish swims by. Sometimes it does. More often, it doesn’t.

Strategic hiring support: the thinking before you engage a recruiter

Whether you're an SME planning your next critical hire, or a growing business building a leadership team from scratch, this is where it starts. My Critical Hire Design Session is built around exactly this kind of thinking. It’s not a recruitment brief. It’s a strategic conversation that covers both parts: the organisational design and the person specification. 

It can happen at the point of need, when you know a hire is coming and you want to get the thinking right before you advertise. Or it can happen earlier, when growth is on the horizon and you want to get ahead of it rather than react to it.

Either way, the output is the same. Clarity on what your team needs to look like, who fits into it and why. A brief and person spec that reflects the actual human you’re trying to find. And a hiring process that gives you a real chance of finding them.

You won’t get a Frankenstein’s monster. Unless, of course, that’s what you need.

If you're thinking about your next hire, or the team you'll need over the next two years, I'm happy to have a conversation. Book a call and let's talk.