The Most Expensive Number on Your Spreadsheet

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Given we help companies hire great leaders for a living, this is a little funny to say… but even though we're highly skilled at behavioral interviews, deep reference checks, the right amount of structure in scorecards (not to brag, but toot toot this team has earned it!), the best read you ever get on someone comes from working beside them.

When it’s possible, it’s AMAZING

The honest limit first: many of the people you want are already in jobs, so you usually can't audition someone who's happily employed elsewhere. Working alongside a person before you hire them will never be the default, and we're not pretending otherwise.

But it's possible more often than you might assume, and when it is, it's frankly an incredible onramp. Our point is the lens is worth widening: instead of treating "see the work first" as a rare exception…look for more of the places where it's possible. Why not aim for the better way more often?

A few thoughtful companies have built their hiring around this wider lens. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, makes a paid trial project mandatory for every role, on the logic that there's "no substitute for working alongside someone in the trenches." (Don't love the war metaphor, but you get the point.) Linear reached the same place: a conventional interview can't tell you whether someone has the judgment and taste their culture runs on. PostHog says the trial frequently surprises them, in both directions, against what the interviews suggested.

Some experiments down this road haven't worked. Buffer ran a paid "bootcamp" for years, then retired it, because a long trial left new hires in limbo and disadvantaged anyone who couldn't float on contractor status. So…the format matters.

Which raises the obvious problem at the top. You can't hand a prospective Head of People or CFO a tidy two-week project. So the executive version of "see the real thing first" looks different: an interim or fractional engagement, where someone does the actual job, on your actual problems, before anyone commits…that's the part we live in.

Could this be your next success story?

Skiffra, a very cool company with an impressive founding team, came to us at a genuine inflection point. They needed to scale their technical founding team quickly, and needed people systems that could hold up as it grew: onboarding, compensation that survives a doubling team, hiring that moves fast enough to land the right people. What they couldn't do was wait months for a perfect hire. The work was needed immediately.

So we placed a fractional Head of People with a dual mandate: fill the critical roles and build the infrastructure underneath them, both at once.

What followed wasn't just competent execution. It was the kind of fit that makes the decision obvious in hindsight. Andy Smith, Skiffra's Co-Founder & COO, put it this way:

"Lilly has been outstanding. She's brought a rare mix of judgment, warmth, organization, and ownership, and has already become someone George and I trust deeply as we think about scaling Skiffra. She represents the company exceptionally well with candidates and stakeholders, and the fit has honestly been stronger than we could have hoped for."

Skiffra converted her to full-time VP of People last month.

"Stronger than we could have hoped for" is worth pausing on. That's not the language of a hire that went to plan. It's a fit that reveals itself through real work, under real conditions. An interview can't manufacture that. An engagement can.

The CFO, same pattern

It repeats across functions and seniority. A client came to us during a CFO turnover, the kind of gap that creates immediate risk and can't sit open for six months. We placed an interim CFO and, at their request, ran a full permanent search at the same time: a real slate of external candidates, vetted and interviewed with the intense rigor a CFO seat deserves. The client worked that process all the way through, then set it against what was already in front of them: the work the interim CFO had delivered, the relationships she'd built, the judgment she'd shown when it counted. They converted her. Both sides knew it was a win/win.

That's the part worth underlining. The search was genuine, not a formality, and the client had strong outside options. They chose the person whose work they'd already seen. Real evidence beat a polished slate.

The same bet, one size up

Here's what makes this bigger than a hiring tip. The stories above show a consequential people decision made on real evidence, someone whose work you'd actually seen. Layoffs are that same decision made on a much larger and opposite basis: a salary line, a single number that's easy to measure, against so many intangibles that aren't.

That's the irony. The people already on your payroll are the only ones whose work you truly know, under real pressure, for real stakes, the exact read an interview can't buy and a trial only approximates. A layoff is often the moment a company throws that away to save the cost, then turns around and interviews strangers to fill the gap. Cutting a known quantity to bet on an unknown one is an expensive trade, even when the spreadsheet says otherwise.

To be sure, that knowledge cuts both ways. Sometimes the work is exactly what tells you a person isn't the right fit, and a thoughtful parting is the honest, even kind, call. The point isn't that everyone you've watched is worth keeping. It's that what you've learned, either way, is real and hard-won, and worth weighing before you trade it for a guess.

The research suggests it's even more expensive than it looks. When Block cut nearly half its workforce, its CEO stressed the company wasn't in trouble; the savings just looked clean. But a model from researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Boston University argues that in a competitive market, firms tend to cut further than is good for anyone, because each keeps its own savings while the lost spending lands on everyone else. It isn't workers losing so owners win. The owners lose too, and the trap doesn't even need AI to spring it, just a lot of companies reaching for the same easy number at once. The human cost, what happens to the people who stay, is its own story, and Brian Elliott has been tracking it more closely than most.

The question worth sitting with

Hiring in a hurry and cutting in a hurry are, underneath, the same bet, and expensive in tangible and intangible ways. The research suggests the cost runs higher than the spreadsheet shows, and our own experience agrees. The thing most worth knowing about a person, how they actually work, is never the easy number. It's evidence you earn.

None of this argues against urgency. We get the need to work with paradoxes. It's a question about what rigor really means when a decision is hard to take back. Often the most rigorous move isn't deciding faster. It's creating the conditions to see the truth before you commit, and valuing that evidence once you have it, whether it tells you to hire someone, keep them, or part ways.

If you're weighing a critical leadership hire, or just wanting to think more clearly about the people you already have as you look ahead to what is needed, we'd love to compare notes. After watching this play out across dozens of placements, the one thing we're sure of is that the read you get from real work beats the one you form across a conference table. Skiffra is one example. It won't be the last.