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The silver bullet recruiter fails
The backlog and the system
A founder ready for a first recruiter is usually already behind on hiring, with a debt of 5, 10, or 15 open roles. The founder also wants a way of hiring that will scale. The temptation is to collapse both jobs into one head of talent.
Why one person fails
A new hire who wants to prove themselves makes hires and may leave no system behind. A new hire who builds the system may fill no roles, and now the founder is not sleeping. Putting both jobs on one person generally fails.
Splitting the jobs
Splitting them works better. One option is to hire the person who will put in the right system and partner them with a contingent recruiter who makes short-term progress while the company learns how it hires. Another is to bring in help to lay the foundation, as the independent firm Growth by Design did, and then hire a high-powered individual contributor recruiter to execute.
Why does urgent work crowd out system building?
Theologian Charles Hummel named the pattern in his 1967 booklet Tyranny of the Urgent. Urgent tasks demand attention now, while important long-term work can always be postponed. President Dwight Eisenhower quoted a college president in a 1954 speech with a related line, that what is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important. The matrix of urgent and important tasks that followed bears his name.
What is the cost of switching between two jobs?
Joshua Rubinstein, David Meyer, and Jeffrey Evans measured task switching in a 2001 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. People took measurably longer and made more errors when moving between tasks than when staying on one. The cost grew with the complexity of the tasks. A single role that alternates between filling roles and designing a process pays that penalty every time.
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