Questions we answer Hiring and headcount

What should my next hire be?

Start from the constraint rather than the wish list. The right next hire is the one that releases the most work or removes the largest risk — which is often not the role that feels most overdue.

Start from this question

Free · a few minutes · starts from “I think we need another person”

The short answer

The right next hire is the one that removes the constraint actually limiting the business, which is often not the one that feels most urgent. Establish what stops happening if you hire nobody, which outcomes have no clear owner, and where work is being turned down. The answer is sometimes not a hire at all: if the constraint is a process nobody designed or decisions that route through one person, a role will not move it and will cost a year finding that out.

Most teams have a list of roles they would like. The useful question is narrower: which single addition would change the most about how the next six months go.

There are usually three honest candidates — the role that unblocks the most other people, the role that removes the largest single point of failure, and the role that takes work off whoever is most stretched. They are frequently different people, and naming which one you are solving for makes the decision much easier.

Is it really this?

Worth checking before you spend anything. These are the signals that tend to tell the two apart.

Signs it is

You can name more than one role you would fill, which means the question is order rather than whether.
There is budget for one hire and you want it to be the right one.
Work is being turned down, delayed or done badly in an area you can point at.

Signs it's something else

Every candidate role is about the same work being done badly rather than not being done at all.
The constraint is a decision nobody is making, which a new person would inherit rather than resolve.
The list is long because expectations have grown faster than revenue, and the honest answer is scope.

What's usually behind it

Growth that has made several gaps visible at once, with no obvious order between them.
A founder doing three jobs, only one of which they should still be doing.
A plan that assumes a role because the business next door has one.
One capable person quietly holding something nobody else can do.

What people usually get wrong

Recruiting the role you understand best rather than the one that constrains the most.
Hiring for the plan rather than the current state, and carrying the cost until the plan arrives.
Filling the noisiest gap, which is usually the one with the loudest advocate rather than the largest effect.
Copying an org chart from a larger company, built for problems you do not have yet.

The options, and when each one fits

In no particular order. Which of these fits depends on your situation, not on the question you typed.

The unblocking hire
One area is holding up work across the team, and adding there releases several people.
The risk hire
Something important depends on one person, or on nobody, and that is the largest exposure.
The relief hire
Your most stretched person spends the week on work somebody else could own outright.
No hire yet, fix the shape
The gaps all sit in the same badly designed flow, which a new person would inherit.

When doing nothing is the right call

If you cannot separate the candidates, that is information in itself: the constraint is probably not headcount. Spend a fortnight watching where work actually waits, and the order usually becomes obvious without anybody being hired.

What the diagnostic asks

What a new person would mainly add: capacity, a missing skill, or both.
How long the need has been there, whether it is growing, and who owns the work today.
How many people could do the work, and whether anyone could grow into it.
How central it is, and whether a permanent hire is fundable.

“I don't know” is always an answer. Nothing is assumed on your behalf.

The routes it weighs

Every diagnostic weighs all ten routes. These are the ones that tend to matter for this question — a description of the rules, not a promise about your answer.

Recruit
Recruit a new person for a durable, sizeable need that is central to the team.
Redistribute
Move ownership of the work to where it fits, and make that explicit.
Process improvement
Change how the work flows — remove steps, name an owner, fix the hand-offs.
Develop
Build the capability in someone already in the team, with time and support.
Specialist support
Bring in a freelancer, consultant or specialist for a defined piece of work.
Outsource
Hand a defined, ongoing scope of work to an external provider.

What changes the answer

A gap that stops other people working outranks one that only makes somebody busy.
A single point of failure with nothing written down usually beats a capacity gap on urgency.
If every candidate role sits inside the same badly designed flow, the flow comes first.

Get your own read

A handful of short questions, then the strongest route for your situation, what's also credible, what we still don't know and what would change our view. No account, no setup.