How to avoid a bad hire: why the same role keeps failing (UK)

The second operations manager handed in his notice on a Thursday, fourteen months after the first one left. The MD's first reaction was that the business had been unlucky twice. Two people, two sets of circumstances, one role that had turned out to be harder to fill than it looked. He told his finance director that afternoon. Then he opened last year's job advert, changed the closing date, and sent it to the same three agencies.

That is the moment this article is about. Because a role filled twice and failed twice within eighteen months usually means the same process is producing the same result, whatever the candidates were like. And the process is the one thing the business has not yet looked at. Somewhere in it, an interview is measuring the wrong thing, a reference call is being skipped, and an offer is going out because the search has dragged on and not because the right person turned up. Change none of that, and the third appointment is already heading the same way.

Two failures, one process

Picture the business, because the pattern hides in the details. A sixty-person precision engineering firm, family-owned, second generation. The managing director ran the shop floor himself until the headcount made that impossible, and he created the operations manager role three years ago as the first real layer between him and the work. No appointment he makes matters more. He has now got it wrong twice.

The first hire came from a much larger manufacturer. He interviewed superbly, talked fluently about lean and supplier development, and was offered the job the following morning. Within four months it was clear he had only ever operated with a planning team and a quality department beneath him. Without them, he could not make a Tuesday run. He left within a year.

The second hire was chosen partly as a reaction to the first: a practical man who had come up through the tools and said all the right things about mucking in. He was well liked. But he could not hold a line with the sales director over-promised delivery dates, and the business drifted back into the MD's diary one decision at a time. Within months the MD was doing the job again, with someone else's name on the door.

Two very different people. Look at how they were chosen, though: the process was identical. Both interviews were led by the MD, mostly unscripted, and in each case the decision was made in the room on impression. Neither candidate's referees were spoken to. The agency confirmed that references were available, the offer letter said the appointment was subject to them, and nobody followed up once a start date was agreed. And both offers went out under the same pressure, at the point where ending the vacancy had quietly become the goal.

What the interview was measuring

An unstructured interview is a conversation, and conversations reward people who are good at conversations. So what the MD actually assessed, across two appointments, was how each candidate performed at being interviewed by him. The first hire was excellent at that. The second was likeable, which is the same test passed differently. Neither interview asked either man to evidence the specific work that had broken the previous occupant of the role.

Instinct itself is worth defending. The MD has thirty years of judgement about people, and it serves him well in most of what he does. But in an interview, instinct responds to confidence and warmth. Neither of those tells you whether someone can run a sixty-person plant without a planner, or push back on a sales director who has just promised the impossible. Decades of selection research point to the same conclusion. Structured interviews, where every candidate faces the same job-specific questions and is scored against the same criteria, are among the best-evidenced predictors of how someone will actually perform, and the ordinary conversational interview trails a long way behind. Structure works for an unglamorous reason: it forces the interview to be about the job.

And there is a subtler effect when the same role fails twice, because the second hire is chosen against the memory of the first. The MD wanted the opposite of the polished corporate operator. So he hired the opposite and, in doing so, measured the candidate against the last man's weaknesses. What the role actually demanded never came into it. The job did not change between the two appointments. The interview did, and both times it took the measure of the man in front of him, never of the work waiting for him.

The reference call that never happened

Ask a managing director why the references were never taken up and the answer is usually some version of "they never tell you anything anyway." There is a grain of truth in it. In the UK, employers have no general legal duty to give a reference at all, outside a few regulated sectors. When one is given, the employer owes a duty of care to the employee and to the recipient. It has to be accurate and fair. Which is why so many businesses now confine themselves to a factual reference: job title, dates of employment, nothing more. Write to HR at a large company, and that is exactly what comes back.

But the reference call is a different instrument from the reference letter, and it is the call nobody makes. A ten-minute conversation with the person who actually managed the candidate, with permission, answers questions no interview can. Did he run the function or coordinate it? Find out what the team beneath him looked like, and what happened the last time a customer promise had to be pulled back. Then ask the one that carries the most weight: would you hire him again for this role, described as it really is? Former managers will often say on the phone what they would never commit to paper. Even a careful, guarded answer tells you something a glowing one does not. In the case above, one call to the first candidate's previous plant manager would have revealed the support structure he was used to. One call about the second would have surfaced the pattern with sales. Both would have taken less time than the interview lunch.

What stops the call from happening is timing, and very little else. By the time an offer is accepted, the MD has already decided, the notice period is ticking, and the reference has become an administrative box to tick on the way to a start date. Making the offer subject to satisfactory references, then never testing whether they are satisfactory, gives the business the paperwork of due diligence without any of the protection. A reference obtained after a decision changes nothing. Obtained before it, the same call is one of the few pieces of independent evidence the whole process contains.

An offer made to end the search

The third element of the repeat is the hardest to see from inside, because it feels like decisiveness. A senior vacancy in a small business is expensive in ways that never appear on a purchase order. The MD covers the role himself. His own work slips, the people reporting into the empty chair start making their own arrangements, and every week the pressure to appoint rises. So at some point the question in the MD's head changes from "is this the right person for this role?" to "is this person good enough to end this?" The candidate in front of him is no longer being compared with the job. He is being compared with another two months of vacancy, and against that comparison, almost anyone looks acceptable.

The cost of getting that call wrong is higher than people expect. Research by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation put the total cost of a poor hire at mid-manager level, on a salary of around £42,000, at more than £132,000 once training, lost productivity and the turnover it triggers are counted. That was in 2017. For an operations manager in a sixty-person plant, the figure is arguably conservative, because lost productivity spreads across the whole floor, not one desk. Two failures in the same role are a quarter of a million pounds of consequence, and the business never wrote a cheque with that number on it. Getting the process right before the money is spent a third time costs a fraction of one failure. That arithmetic is what turns structured hiring from caution into commercial sense.

What a structured hire for this role looks like

A business of sixty people can do all of this without an assessment centre or a psychometric suite. What it needs is to treat the two failures as evidence, and to build the next appointment around what that evidence says.

Start with the role, and be specific in a way the original advert was not. Two people have now failed in it, and between them they have written the job description that should have existed at the start. The first showed that the role must be delivered without a support function, so the person needs to do the planning and the chasing himself. The second showed that the role must hold a line against sales, so the person needs to have done that somewhere and be able to say how. Those two requirements, drawn from what actually went wrong, are worth more than any list of generic competencies. They become the spine of everything that follows.

Then design the interview around them. Every candidate gets the same questions, and each one asks the candidate to describe something he has actually done. Tell me about a period when you ran production without a planner. Walk me through the last time you told a sales director a date could not be met, and what changed as a result. Score each answer against a written standard before the panel discusses impressions. Otherwise, the discussion drifts straight back to who they liked. And where the work can be shown instead of described, ask for it, because a half-day on the floor with a live scheduling problem tells an MD more than any second interview.

Take references before the decision, by telephone, from the people who managed the candidate, with a short list of questions built from the same two requirements. If a candidate's referees are unavailable or evasive, that is information too. And separate the person who runs the scoring from the person who feels the vacancy most acutely. The MD should absolutely be in the room. He should not be the one keeping score on a role he is currently doing himself at eleven o'clock at night.

All of this fits inside the same number of weeks as an unstructured search. It simply moves the effort to the front of the process, where it changes the outcome, instead of the back, where it only records one.

Why the next appointment carries a different cost

One more reason the third attempt matters more than the first two has nothing to do with the candidate. From 1 January 2027, the qualifying period for unfair dismissal in Great Britain falls from two years to six months, and the compensation cap goes with it. The two previous operations managers left in a legal environment where the business could act with relative freedom during their first two years. The next one will not. So a hire made this autumn is a different legal decision from the last one. By the time it becomes clear whether it has worked, the employee will be protected.

Which puts the weight on the appointment itself, because what follows it now has far less room to correct a mistake. Probation is where a business manages the early months of a hire already made, and the probation process needs its own rebuilding before January, with shorter periods and reviews that mean something. But probation was never designed to rescue a poor selection. From next year it is a far weaker safety net than it has been. The place to stop the repeat is the decision, before the offer letter exists, while the evidence is still cheap to gather.

Frequently asked questions

How much does a bad hire cost a UK business?

The Recruitment and Employment Confederation estimated in 2017 that a poor hire at mid-manager level, on a salary of around £42,000, costs a business more than £132,000 once training, lost productivity and increased staff turnover are included. In a small business, the true figure depends on how much of the organisation depends on the role. For a senior operational hire, it is often higher, because the disruption spreads across the whole team.

Do UK employers have to give a reference?

There is no general legal obligation to provide a reference, apart from specific regulated sectors such as financial services. Where an employer does give one, it must be accurate and fair, and many businesses limit themselves to confirming job title and dates for that reason. A telephone conversation with the candidate's former manager, taken with the candidate's permission before an offer is made, is a far more useful source of evidence than a written factual reference.

What should a recruitment process for a small business include?

At minimum: a role definition built around what the job actually demands, a structured interview where every candidate answers the same job-specific questions and is scored against a written standard, some form of practical exercise where the work can be shown, and telephone references taken while the decision is still open. The process should be run so that the pressure of the vacancy does not become the deciding factor.

The role is already open again

The MD in the story above will fill the role a third time within a few months, because the business cannot run without it. What is still undecided is whether he fills it the same way. The two failures have already told him what the job requires and where his process stopped looking. The only open question is whether that evidence gets used or filed.

If the same role has been filled twice in your business and failed twice, send us a short message describing the role and how the last two appointments were made. Nick or the team will respond with a direct view of where the process keeps repeating, and what a structured hire for that specific role would look like.