The gun hire

A few years ago we were helping a rapidly growing business hire its next layer of talent. The pipeline was full, the executive team was energised, and into that momentum walked a well-known gun business development executive from a direct competitor.

On paper he was everything they wanted. In the interview he spoke with total confidence about the revenue he would bring. He knew the market. He knew the clients. He made bold promises about what he could deliver, and for a team in growth mode it was compelling.

But as the conversation unfolded, the warning signs stacked up. He spoke casually about poaching customers from his current employer. He criticised their management openly. He treated burning bridges as a standard cost of doing business.

Our advice to the executive team was direct: do not make this hire. Whatever he delivered in revenue, the way he operated would collide with everything they were trying to build. A person who will burn one employer for advantage will burn the next.

The room was divided. Some saw the revenue. Some saw the risk. The debate was genuine and the pressure was real, because growth windows do not stay open forever and the numbers he promised were substantial. In the end the short-term numbers won. He was hired.

In their position, plenty of good teams would have made the same call. This was a capable executive team making a defensible decision under commercial pressure. That is precisely what makes the story worth telling, because values are never tested when the choice is easy.

Six months later he was gone. He left behind a dispirited sales team, conflict in parts of the business that had never known it, and disappointed customers. Regretted departures followed. The distraction reached the point where it showed up in the sales numbers themselves, at exactly the moment the business had expected them to surge. Not one of the promised gains materialised. He moved on to another competitor, where we suspect the pattern continued.

That was when the engagement changed. The client asked us to lead the rebuild, and to their great credit, they were willing to confront what the episode had revealed rather than write it off as one bad hire.

Leading the rebuild meant going deeper than replacing one salesperson. We ran culture workshops with the leadership team built around two uncomfortable questions: are our values really our values, and can we make the tough calls for them? We coached the executives individually, including the CEO, on upholding those values when they were not being displayed, because a value the CEO will not enforce is an aspiration wearing a value's clothes. We rebuilt their hiring approach around our CLEAR framework, so that verified evidence of how a candidate actually operates carries as much weight as the revenue they promise. And we worked alongside them to embed culture in daily practice, so it showed up in meetings, performance conversations and everyday decisions.

The turnaround took time, and it held. Turnover settled. The next hires stuck. The numbers recovered and then improved. And the feedback we value most came in plainer language than any metric: people told us it felt good to come to work again.

The lesson we took from it, and the one the client would tell you themselves, is that values are a decision-making system or they are nothing. If they cannot override a compelling revenue promise in a hiring decision, they will not survive contact with any hard call, and your people will draw the obvious conclusion.

Hiring is where culture is coded. Every early hire either reinforces what you say you stand for or teaches the organisation that it is negotiable.

The hiring discipline we rebuilt for this client is the same one we've since written up in full: Hire Like It Matters, our whitepaper on the Vitr CLEAR Hiring Framework. If your organisation is weighing a hire where the numbers and the values point in different directions, it is worth twenty minutes of your time before you decide.