Good Hires, Bad Outcomes: What Startups Get Wrong About Hiring

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In startup hiring conversations, speed is often treated as a virtue. Founders are encouraged to move quickly, avoid overthinking decisions, and prioritise momentum, especially in the early days. The underlying belief is not that bad hires are acceptable, but that moving too slowly can be just as risky.

This shows up in familiar advice: don’t wait for perfect clarity, hire builders over perfect fits, and course-correct later if needed. In some contexts, this might be solid advice.

The problem begins when this bias toward speed is treated as universally applicable. What works for a three-person founding team trying to close immediate execution gaps does not work the same way for a one-fifty-person company making its first leadership hires. Yet, in practice, the same hiring logic is often applied across very different situations.

This is where hiring decisions in startups tend to break down. Speed, risk, and quality do not mean the same thing at every stage of a company or for every role. The question you must ask yourself is: how do hiring decisions need to change as the startup changes?

This piece explores that question through two lenses that matter most in startup environments: company stage and role seniority.

How Hiring Decisions Should Change as a Startup Grows

Most hiring advice assumes that better execution, more structure, faster decisions, and stronger processes will automatically lead to better outcomes. But this assumption does not hold true for every stage and age of a startup.

As a startup grows, what changes is not just its headcount. But also how hiring risk shows up, how visible mistakes are, and how reversible decisions remain. 

When founders and early HR teams continue using the same mental model across stages, hiring doesn’t break dramatically; it starts underperforming in ways that are harder to spot and more expensive to fix.

Each stage carries hiring mistakes that feel reasonable in the moment but can be extremely costly in hindsight.

Early Stage (1-10 People): When Belief Hides Misalignment 

In the early stage, hiring is deeply personal. New joiners work directly with founders, roles are fluid, and progress depends on people figuring things out as they go. Trust, familiarity, and perceived passion often outweigh formal evaluation.

The most common mistake here is confusing belief in the idea with alignment on trade-offs.

Ankit Aggarwal, Unstop founder, observes that early hires rarely fail due to a lack of skill. They fail because expectations around pay, pace, ownership, or uncertainty were never explicitly aligned. 

Candidates may agree to join for lower compensation or ambiguous roles out of excitement for growth or building something new. But unless those compromises are consciously owned, they resurface later as disengagement, frustration, or quiet resentment. 

Teams that avoid this early misalignment don’t rely on enthusiasm alone. They make the trade-offs clear, especially what the role will not provide in the next 6-12 months. When this conversation is skipped or softened to close the hire faster, hesitation later is almost inevitable.

Early-stage hiring doesn't end at resource alignment. There’s another layer that often only becomes visible later. Once you get these early hires right, you’re not just filling roles, you’re making a bet on who will grow with the company. And for that, you need to give them time, context, and active guidance to grow into the kind of professionals your startup will need at different stages. Without that, even strong early hires can start to plateau as the company moves forward.

Growth Stage (10-50 people): When Great Performers Don’t Scale 

As startups grow, founders can no longer be everywhere. First-time managers emerge, informal processes solidify, and coordination begins to matter as much as individual output.

Here, a different hiring mistake takes over: hiring to relieve today’s pressure instead of building tomorrow’s ownership.

Srishti Kataria, who leads Team People at Unstop, and has hired leaders for multiple verticals, describes a familiar pattern. Managers hire strong individual contributors to solve immediate workload issues without evaluating whether those hires can eventually lead, prioritize, or build systems that work without constant oversight.

The result is a team of capable executors, but none ready to multiply others. These hires look successful in the short term and slow the organisation over time. Note that at this stage, misalignment doesn’t frustrate just one founder; it cascades across teams.

Teams that scale cleanly here hire against decisions, not tasks. Say, for example, before making an offer, managers must articulate which decisions should no longer come to them once this role exists. If that answer is unclear, know that the hire adds capacity but not ownership.

Scaling Stage (50-200 People): When Judgment Compounds

By the time a startup reaches this stage, hiring decisions start compounding quietly. Individual mis-hires may not trigger immediate alarms, but their downstream effects on culture, morale, and decision quality surface months later.

Here, the primary risk is no longer speed or capability. It’s judgment.

Senior hires and others with disproportionate influence shape how decisions are made, how conflict is handled, and which behaviours are rewarded or tolerated. At this level, hiring mistakes stop appearing as performance gaps and start showing up as culture issues, execution drift, or leadership misalignment.

Advice like ‘hire fast and fix later’ becomes actively dangerous at scale. Problems introduced here are harder to diagnose, slower to surface, and far more difficult to reverse.

To avoid this cultural drift, teams must evaluate how candidates make trade-offs, handle disagreement, and operate under ambiguity, because these behaviours get copied long after the hire is made.

How Hiring Decisions Should Change by Role Seniority

(and why “good hires” fail differently at different levels)

Even when startups adjust hiring by stage, things can still go wrong. When the same evaluation logic is applied across very different levels of seniority.

More often than not, the issue isn’t who was hired, it’s what the role demanded versus what the hire was evaluated for. Junior, mid-level, and senior roles don’t just differ in responsibility. They differ in how ambiguity shows up, where decisions get made, and how mistakes travel. Treating them the same is where trouble begins.

Junior Roles: When Clarity Backfires

Junior hires are often brought in to execute, which leads teams to over-index on task clarity but under-index on learning ability.

In startups, this breaks quickly. 

As scope shifts, priorities change, and yesterday’s clear task becomes today’s obsolete requirement, junior hires tend to freeze. Not because they’re incapable, but because they weren’t assessed for how they learn when the brief changes.

Anshika Tripathi, Manager People at Unstop, captures this well: hiring for defined outputs rather than defined responsibilities works far better. When success is framed as “do these tasks,” junior hires wait for direction. When success is framed as “achieve this outcome,” they adapt.

Teams that hire well at this level pay attention to how candidates respond when instructions are incomplete or change mid-conversation. Not to test confidence, but to observe learning behavior under uncertainty.

Mid-level Roles: When Competence Hides Dependency

Mid-level hires are the most deceptively safe category. They come with experience, deliver quickly, and raise the quality bar almost immediately.

But this is exactly where startups accumulate dependency.

The most common misjudgment here is assuming that strong execution automatically translates into ownership. When mid-level hires are excellent problem-solvers, but hesitant to decide which problems matter most or to challenge unclear direction, output improves, but decisions still flow upward and managers stay central by default.

The best way to counter such issues is to pressure-test how the candidate prioritises without context, i.e., what they choose to solve first, what they defer, and what they challenge. Ask yourself: Does ownership actually move, or does execution just get faster?

Senior Roles: When Judgement Matters More Than Experience

Senior hires rarely fail due to a lack of capability. When they fail, it is almost always due to misaligned judgment.

At this level, the impact shows up in how meetings are run, how conflict is resolved, how risk is tolerated, and which behaviors quietly become acceptable. The mistake teams make is evaluating senior candidates primarily on past success, domain expertise, or leadership presence while under-evaluating how they operate under ambiguity in this specific context.

Teams that get it right spend less time admiring résumés and more time watching how candidates reason through real trade-offs that matter here, not elsewhere.

A Better Way to Think About Hiring in Startups

Hiring in startups rarely fails because teams don’t move fast enough or lack good intentions. It fails when context changes, but judgment logic does not.

As startups grow and roles evolve, the same hiring instincts that once worked begin to create friction. The challenge is not to find better rules, but to recognise when old ones have expired. It is only when judgment evolves with context, hiring decisions stop feeling reactive and start compounding in the right direction.

This is the mindset that The Accidental HR series will keep returning to. Not answers you can copy, but questions worth recalibrating as your startup grows.

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