Hire Slowly, Fire Fast

Editor’s note: This essay sits on Cultivated’s Work & Leadership shelf. It explores a simple leadership standard: treat hiring as an act of care, and treat underperformance as an obligation to address — quickly, clearly, and fairly.

Hire Slowly. Fire Fast.

I keep seeing the phrase “hire fast, fire fast” pop up online.

The idea is simple:
get people through the door quickly, and if they don’t work out, let them go just as quickly.

It sounds bold. Efficient. Even entrepreneurial.

But I don’t buy it.

In practice, it’s one of the fastest ways to damage your people, your reputation, and your culture.

A better standard is quieter, and harder:

Hire slowly. Fire fast.

Not because firing is easy.
Because avoiding it is often worse.

Hiring fast plays with people’s lives

A “fast hire” is rarely fast for the person living it.

I’ve seen this pattern too many times:

Someone leaves a stable job.
They take the risk.
They rearrange family life.
They walk into a new company trying to prove themselves.

And within weeks, they’re out again.

A dent in the CV. A knock to confidence. A mess of uncertainty they didn’t need.

Yes, every job carries risk. But when you hire quickly without defining expectations, success criteria, or the real shape of the role, you’re not moving fast.

You’re gambling.

And the person paying the emotional price isn’t the organisation.

Firing is failure, not a strategy

Even during probation, firing isn’t painless.

There’s the practical work: HR process, access removal, handovers, team reshuffling.
And then there’s the human part: shame, anxiety, shock, anger, relief, grief.

Paul Hawken put it plainly:

“Firing is failure. Everybody is at fault. The best way to avoid firing people is to hire well in the first place.”

Firing should never be Plan A.

But pretending a bad fit will fix itself is not kindness either.

Every dismissal creates a question

When people see churn, they don’t just observe it.

They absorb it.

They start asking, quietly:

“Am I next?”

That single question changes how people show up.

Teams under threat don’t take sensible risks.
They don’t challenge assumptions.
They don’t speak truth to power.
They protect themselves.

And once fear becomes part of the environment, performance becomes hard to find.

Stability matters.

Not comfort. Not complacency.

Stability.

The wrong hire doesn’t stay contained

A poor hire can do real damage quickly:

Standards drop.
Colleagues get frustrated.
Customers get a different experience.
The manager’s attention disappears into performance management.

Hiring slowly isn’t bureaucracy.

It’s protection.

For your team’s momentum, and the culture you’re trying to build.

People take time

Not everyone “hits the ground running”.

Some people need context.
Some need clearer direction.
Some need time to learn the real system — the unwritten rules, the relationships, the constraints.

A “hire fast, fire fast” mindset often creates lazy management:

We don’t develop.
We don’t coach.
We don’t shape the work.
We just churn people until someone survives the environment.

Sometimes what looks like a “bad hire” is simply a person trying to succeed inside a vague role with unclear expectations.

That is not their failure.

That’s yours.

The hidden costs are always bigger than the spreadsheet

Hiring is expensive: recruiters, interview time, onboarding, kit, licences, training.

Firing is expensive in a different way: lost time, morale, momentum, trust.

And when you hire recklessly, you’re not just risking someone’s career.

You’re wasting the organisation’s resources — and your team’s emotional bandwidth.

If you need someone that quickly, pause

If the business is desperate for capacity, there are other moves:

Contractors. Freelancers. Interim help.

Speed is sometimes necessary.

But speed is not automatically effective.

In the long run, you want effective.

Bad hires steal leadership attention

Every hour spent managing low performance is an hour you’re not:

building ability,
improving the system,
supporting high performers,
or moving the work forward.

Good hiring is not a recruiting task.
It’s a leadership investment.

You’re always sending signals

Your team watches how you hire.

A slapdash process sends messages:

We don’t care who joins.
We don’t protect standards.
We make bets with people’s lives.

High standards in hiring build trust.

They also reassure good people that you’re serious about the environment you’re building.

The cost of “making do”

The other problem with “hire fast, fire fast” is that it often becomes:

Hire fast. Keep them anyway.

Managers avoid the hard conversations.
People get moved sideways.
Teams bloat.
High performers quietly leave.

Average becomes normal.

And the longer that goes on, the harder it is to attract great people, and even hard to go from idea to value.

A better standard

Hire slowly. Fire fast.

That means:

• Treat hiring as a decision, not a rush.
• Focus on behaviour as much as skill.
• Define success clearly and early.
• Respect the candidate’s time, energy and attention. Good people are interviewing you too.
• Train managers to interview well. Ask behavioural questions. Avoid vague hypotheticals.
• When it’s not working, act quickly and professionally. Don’t let drift turn into resentment.

You won’t always get it right.

But you will get it right far more often.

And when you get it wrong, you’ll deal with it with the clarity and care people deserve.

Final thought

Hiring is one of the most important activities in any organisation.

Get it right and you multiply the capability of the whole team.
Get it wrong and you pay for it — in money, morale, and momentum.

So don’t gamble with “hire fast, fire fast.”

Hire slowly. Fire fast.

Build the kind of company where the right people can actually thrive.

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Editor’s note: This essay grows from an earlier exploration in another medium. The thinking remains central, even as the format has changed.