ยท 7 min read
Why "hire slower" is worse advice than "fire faster".
"Hire slow, fire fast" is two pieces of advice, and the wrong half gets all the attention. The teams that over-hired almost all believed they were hiring carefully. The break was not at the top of the funnel. It was the courage to end a hire that was not working in month 3, before it cost a year. Tightening the way you hire will not fix a team that never removes anyone. Learning to decide early will.
What you have probably noticed
You tightened the hiring process. More interview rounds, a take-home, a higher bar, a slower yes. You did everything the advice told you to do. And the team still feels too big and too slow for what it ships. Meanwhile there are two or three people you would not hire again if the role opened today, and everyone around them knows it. You have known it for months. The careful process you built filters who comes in. It does nothing about who is already here.
So the open roles sit a little longer, which feels responsible, and the mis-hires sit a lot longer, which feels like nothing at all until you add it up. The thing you optimised was never the thing that was broken.
What it actually means
"Hire slow, fire fast" is two instructions, and founders obey the first and quietly drop the second. The reason is not laziness. It is that the two halves cost completely different things. Hiring slower feels like diligence, earns a nod from the board, and costs nothing socially: a role stays open a few extra weeks. Ending a hire that is not working feels like admitting you got it wrong, costs an uncomfortable conversation now, and reads to a tired team as a threat. One half is applauded. The other is avoided. So the applauded half gets all the process and the avoided half gets none.
Look at the actual arithmetic and it inverts the advice. The cost of a slow hire is a few weeks of an open seat. The cost of a kept mis-hire is months of fully loaded salary, plus the drag on the people working around them, plus the slow lesson the team learns that the bar does not actually bind once you are through the door. A seat kept empty an extra month is cheap. A wrong hire kept 15 months when you knew at month 3 is the single most expensive thing most founders do with engineering, and it never shows up as a line item, because it is paid in delivery that did not happen.
Here is the part the advice gets right and states badly. By the end of the first 90 days you almost always know. The information arrives early. The decision arrives late. The entire cost lives in that gap, between the week you knew and the quarter you finally acted. "Fire fast" is a bad name for the real skill, which is not speed to the door. It is honesty at the 90-day mark, and the willingness to act on what you already see.
What to do about it
- Decide what "working" means before the person starts. Write it down for 30, 60, and 90 days. Not a vague sense of progress: what they will have shipped, owned, or unblocked by each mark. If you cannot say what good looks like at 90 days, you have no way to tell a mis-hire from a slow start, and with no line to point at you will default to waiting, which always favours the mistake.
- Hold a real 90-day review, and be honest about which problem you have. Separate a ramp problem from a fit problem, because they are not the same decision. A ramp problem, someone good who is slow in a hard domain, gets a written plan and a date. A fit problem does not get another two quarters in the hope it resolves itself. It almost never does, and every month you wait, the person builds a tenure and a set of relationships that make the eventual exit harder for everyone, including them.
- Decide fast, exit slowly and well. The speed belongs in the decision, not in the door. Once you are sure, the exit itself follows the law and treats the person with notice and dignity. The legal mechanics differ by country, and they are not the point of this post: Belgium has no trial period and short notice in the first months, the Netherlands allows a brief proeftijd. The two country guides cover the sequence, for Belgium and the Netherlands. What ruins people is not acting early. It is letting a hire run to 18 months and then ending it anyway, which is the cruel version, for the person most of all.
- Fix the manager, not just the hire. A mis-hire kept for a year is usually a manager who was never given permission or a process to end it. If letting someone go requires founder sign-off and feels like a confession, it will not happen on time. Give your managers a clear 90-day gate, the authority to use it, and the explicit message that ending a hire that is not working is the job, not a failure at it.
- Use the bar on both ends. A hiring bar that only gates entry and never gates "still here" erodes, because the team watches who stayed. You do not need a cull to defend it. You need the two or three decisions you have been postponing to actually happen, so the bar means something to the people who cleared it.
In almost every over-hired team I have been called into, the founder could name the people who were not working out inside the first five minutes, and had been able to name them for months or longer. The hire that broke the budget was not a reckless one made in a hurry. It was the one nobody ended. Tightening the funnel would not have saved a single one of those teams. Deciding at month 3 instead of month 15 would have saved all of them. This is the quiet mechanism behind most teams that need right-sizing: not one bad year of hiring, but years of never removing anyone.
When not to reach for this
This is not an argument for a hair-trigger. "Fire fast" is about mis-hires inside the first months, where the question is fit and you genuinely know. It is not licence to cull a tenured engineer who had one bad quarter, and it is not a stack rank. If you are ending people every quarter, the fault is upstream, in how you hire or how you onboard, and ending them faster only industrialises a broken funnel. Fix the intake.
It is also not a substitute for a real right-sizing. Ending individual mis-hires is about fit. Removing roles because the strategy or the budget changed is a structural decision with its own rules, and trying to do a structural cut one quiet exit at a time, to dodge the collective-dismissal thresholds and the conversation that goes with them, is its own failure mode. If the problem is the shape of the org and not a handful of wrong hires, that is a restructuring question, and the honest way to see which one you have is a structured diagnosis. And when the person who is not working out is the CTO, the decision is the same but the stakes and the sequence are not: that is its own problem, covered in the signs your CTO is not the right one for the next stage.
Frequently asked
Does over-hiring come from hiring too fast?
Rarely. Almost every over-hired team I have walked into hired carefully, with more interview rounds and a higher bar than the year before. The bloat did not come from reckless offers. It came from never removing anyone, so every hire accumulated. The founder could usually name the two or three people who were not working out, and had been able to name them for months. The expensive mistake was not an offer made too quickly. It was a mis-hire kept too long.
What does "hire slow, fire fast" actually mean?
It is two instructions, and most founders obey the first and ignore the second. Hiring slower feels like diligence and costs nothing socially. Ending a hire that is not working feels like admitting a mistake and costs something immediately, so it gets delayed. "Fire fast" does not mean a hair-trigger or firing for its own sake. It means deciding fast once the first 90 days have told you what they are going to tell you, and then handling the exit properly and by the law.
How do you know in the first 90 days whether a hire is working?
Write down what working looks like at 30, 60, and 90 days before the person starts. If you cannot say what good looks like at 90 days, you cannot tell a mis-hire from a slow start, and you will default to waiting. At the 90-day mark, separate a ramp problem from a fit problem. A ramp problem gets a written plan and a date. A fit problem does not get another two quarters in the hope it resolves itself, because it almost never does.
Is "fire fast" the same as a right-sizing?
No, and confusing them is a trap. Ending individual mis-hires inside the first months is about fit. A right-sizing is a structural decision to remove roles because the strategy or the budget changed. If you find yourself ending people every quarter, the problem is your hiring or onboarding, not your speed. And dribbling out individual exits to avoid a real right-sizing conversation, including its collective-dismissal rules, is its own failure mode, not a clever way around one.
Written from patterns I've seen across engagements. If any of it sounds too specific to be general, that's why.