Ask anyone who has spent real time hiring, and they’ll have a story. The phone screen where the candidate was clearly shopping — you could hear the checkout beeps. The one where kids were screaming in the background, and the candidate kept asking you to repeat the question.
We laugh about those, then go right back to running interviews the way we always have: no plan, no scorecard, no consistent questions. Just a conversation, a gut feeling and an offer letter.
That’s how bad hires happen — not because you’re a poor judge of people, but because you gave yourself nothing to judge against. I’ve spent years building hiring software for small and mid-sized businesses, and I’ve watched hundreds of owners make the same unforced errors. The fix is free. It’s structure, and it takes an afternoon to build.