For many new managers, the first hiring decision they make is also one of the most consequential they will ever make. A great hire raises the entire team's performance, brings energy and perspective that would not exist without them, and frees up capacity that the team genuinely needs. A poor hire has costs that extend well beyond the immediate impact: the time spent managing underperformance, the effect on team morale and the months it takes to recover the ground lost. Approaching the first hire with the same rigour you would apply to any important decision is one of the highest-value investments of attention you can make as a new manager.
1 Define the role before you define the person
The most common hiring mistake is writing a job description that describes the ideal person rather than the actual role — a wish list of qualifications and traits that does not clearly specify what the person will actually do, what problems they will solve and what success will look like in their first year. This produces interviews that assess credentials rather than capability, and offers made to people who look good on paper but are poorly matched to the real requirements of the work.
Before writing any description or beginning any search, spend time defining the role with genuine specificity: what are the three to five most important things this person needs to accomplish in the next twelve months? What problems currently exist that this hire is supposed to solve? What does the team currently lack that they will bring? The answers to these questions are more useful than any list of desired qualifications because they define the job as it actually is, not as it might be imagined to be in the abstract.
Write a 'success profile' before writing a job description: a one-page document that describes what this person will have achieved in their first 90 days, six months and twelve months if the hire is a success. Share it with your own manager and get alignment before you start the process. This document becomes both your hiring rubric and your onboarding plan — two things that are much more valuable to have before the hire than after it.
2 Design your interview process to assess what actually matters
Most unstructured interviews test how well someone interviews, not how well they will do the job. If left to their own instincts, interviewers tend to ask general questions, follow conversational threads wherever they lead and make decisions on the basis of likability and confidence — neither of which correlates reliably with job performance. A structured interview process, where the same questions are asked of all candidates and assessed against a consistent rubric, is significantly more predictive and fairer to all parties involved.
The questions you ask should be designed to surface evidence of the specific capabilities you defined in your success profile. For each key capability, you want at least one question that asks for a concrete example — "Tell me about a time when..." — and probes for the detail that distinguishes genuine experience from a polished narrative. Vague answers to experience questions are informative in their own right: someone who cannot describe what they did specifically probably did not do it as much as they suggest.
For each key capability you are hiring for, write one specific behavioural interview question before the process begins. Use the STAR framework as your assessment structure: what was the Situation, what Task did they have, what Action did they take, what was the Result? After each interview, score each answer against this rubric before discussing the candidate with others — group discussions tend to anchor on the first opinion expressed and lose the value of independent assessment.
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Explore the program — €2993 Involve your team in the process — thoughtfully
Involving team members in the hiring process serves several purposes: it brings additional perspectives on candidates, it signals that their view of who joins the team matters and it builds commitment to making the eventual hire successful. However, it needs to be structured deliberately. An unstructured team panel that does not know what it is assessing adds noise rather than signal and can introduce the same biases that unstructured interviews always produce.
The most useful form of team involvement is assigning each team member involved a specific capability area to explore, rather than having everyone ask whatever feels natural. Brief participants beforehand on what they are looking for and ask them to provide structured written feedback afterwards. This focuses the contribution and gives you something comparable across candidates, rather than a collection of general impressions that are difficult to reconcile.
When involving team members in interviews, give each of them a specific brief: 'Your job in this conversation is to explore this person's approach to [specific capability area]. Here are two questions you can use. Afterwards, I'll ask you to score them on a 1–5 scale on that dimension with specific observations.' This takes five minutes to set up and dramatically improves the quality of the input you get — while also respecting the time of both the team member and the candidate.
4 Do not skip the reference check
Reference checks are often treated as a formality — a box to tick after the decision has effectively already been made. Done well, they are one of the most valuable sources of information in the hiring process, because they give you direct access to the observations of people who have actually worked closely with the candidate. The question is not whether to do them but how to get something genuinely useful out of them.
The key is to ask specific, behaviour-focused questions rather than general ones. "Was this person a good employee?" produces a useless answer. "What is this person's greatest strength in a professional context, and what is the area where they most need to develop?" produces something real. "How did they handle situations where they disagreed with a direction?" "How did they respond to feedback that was critical of their work?" These questions, asked of someone who actually managed the candidate, give you information that no interview can replicate.
Ask the candidate to arrange their own reference calls — with people who have managed them directly, not just colleagues who think well of them. When you have the reference on the line, ask: 'On a scale of 1 to 10, how strongly would you rehire this person in a similar role?' Then ask what would need to be different for that score to be a 10. The gap between their score and 10 is where the most useful information in the conversation often lives.
5 Onboard them well — the hire is not finished at the offer
The hiring process does not end when a candidate accepts the offer. The onboarding period — typically the first 90 days — is when the hire either becomes a high performer or begins the slower trajectory toward a poor outcome. Most onboarding failures are not the result of a wrong hire; they are the result of insufficient investment in integrating the person into their new context and setting them up to succeed in the specific requirements of the role.
A new hire needs clarity about their priorities, introduction to the people and processes they will depend on, regular structured check-ins during the first months and explicit permission to ask questions and raise concerns without fear that it will reflect badly on them. The investment required to onboard someone well is small relative to the cost of onboarding them poorly — and the managers who do it consistently produce better results from their hires across the board.
Before a new team member's first day, prepare: a written set of priorities for their first 30 days, a list of the people they should meet and why, a schedule for your check-ins in the first three months, and a clear description of what you will use to assess whether the first three months have been a success. Share all of this on day one. New hires who arrive to a thoughtfully prepared context feel valued and get to work faster — both of which matter for the quality of the hire you ultimately get.
The bottom line
Hiring is one of the decisions where the difference between a thoughtful process and an instinctive one is most visible, and most consequential. The manager who defines the role clearly, designs structured interviews around the right capabilities, involves the team deliberately, conducts real reference checks and onboards thoroughly will, over time, build a meaningfully better team than the one who does not. The return on the time invested is significant and durable.
For a first hire especially, the effort to get it right is worth making. The person you hire will shape the team's capability, culture and output for years — and your experience of working with them will shape your understanding of what hiring well looks like for every decision that follows.