New hire not working out? 2 gaps leaders miss

Most new-hire problems are process problems, not people problems. Host Lia Garvin pinpoints the two hiring-process gaps leaders commonly skip — both happen before a new hire can hit their stride — and offers practical fixes managers can use in the first weeks to improve onboarding, role clarity, and accountability. For founders, people managers, and business owners who want faster ramp-up and better retention.

In this episode you will learn:

• Why the interview needs to go beyond skills questions, and what happens when expectations go unset
• The Google story: a senior hire from McKinsey who had every qualification and still wasn't set up to succeed, and exactly what was missing from day one
• What knowledge transfer actually looks like for a senior role and why it's the highest-leverage investment you can make in the first two weeks
• How to get aligned on what success looks like in the first 90 days, even when you're not fully sure yourself
• The real cost of turnover: Gallup's 50-200% replacement cost in real dollars, and why this conversation is worth having

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© 2026 Lia Garvin / Managing Made Simple

Transcript

Lia (00:00)
You did it, you finally made that big hire and they were expensive, but they have a ton of experience and you know that this is going to take work off your plate. It's gonna get you out of the weeds. And then the person starts and you're super excited. You kind of give them the download of everything and you expect them to be off and running. And a couple of days later, weeks later, you're like, this is what you came up with or why would that make sense? Or what is going on over here? This person is not doing this at all the way I imagined it.

And right away you get this feeling of buyer's remorse. And I've been there. And I think all of us have been there that make this big hire. We take this huge leap. We take this financial risk. And then we're looking around saying, I don't think this is the right person. Well, today on the show, we are talking about this exact situation that I know so many of us have found ourselves in. Whether you are a business owner or a corporate leader that big hire, maybe finally hired someone that you've been

begging for that head count for, and now you're like, I don't know about this. For business owners, this is money out of your own pocket feeling like, my gosh, I don't wanna take that risk ever again. We're talking about how to avoid this by setting up the hiring process right from the beginning. And there are two things for me diving into, so you're wanna listen to the end.

so on the show today, we are gonna be talking about the two things that ensure that when you bring someone on, they are set up as best as you can. Now there are no guarantees with hiring because we're dealing with people and humans are complicated, but we can de-risk this so much by doing these two things that I'm gonna talk about today.

it comes to bringing in anybody on your team, junior role or senior role, we're always taking a risk. We're dealing with humans. Humans are complicated. They come with all different sorts of things. They might be great in an interview and not really be able to do the job that they said they could do. Or they might have fantastic experience somewhere else, but it just doesn't translate to your team culture. So there are no guarantees, but we can definitely de-risk it by doing the two things that we're gonna talk about on the show today. The first one is around the hiring and interviewing.

process and the second one is about really downloading that kind of knowledge transfer. And that's a pretty corporatey way of saying like getting someone to be able to sort of reach your mind, which was the goal in the first place for these senior roles. You're needing someone to really understand right away how to operate at your level so that they're maintaining that expectation you have. Now let's talk about the first piece, bringing in the right person.

And sometimes we rush it. Sometimes we bring in the first person that reaches out or sends a resume. They seem like a great fit. They check all the boxes. We want to try to interview and meet with a few different people because we want to understand, wait, how is this person relative to another person with maybe a different set of skills or a different background or, some sort of other composition of things that could be good for this role. So super low hanging fruit is to talk to at least three people for a role just so that you get that balanced perspective.

But this is not really about the recruiting process. I want to talk about the interviewing process because this is where so many of us fall short. We do an interview that's just about the specifics of the role and we are not getting under the surface about what that person really needs to do from a bigger picture, a bigger thinker perspective. And a lot of, and this is so important for bigger roles, so important when you're bringing someone on for a leadership role, which is what we're talking about today. We need to understand

how this person thinks, how they solve problems, how they are going to take responsibility for helping grow the business or drive the strategy forward. And if we are not asking those kinds of questions, we can't be surprised later if we don't like how they handle those, because we actually had no idea and we never gave them an opportunity to explain that to us. Now, when I work with clients in my Ops Playbook program, I actually write out questions to ask in interviews that map to that company's values.

because we wanna be able to really get at those specifics when we ask these questions. again, it's not a guarantee, but we have a better sense of, okay, this is how they approach that thing that's important to me because it's in my company's values. Do I agree with that? Is that going to bring a great perspective, something that I think will move the needle, or are we kind of out of alignment? These kinds of questions are really important. And that's why it's so helpful and critical to talk to a few different people.

because you're gonna wanna see how some of these perspectives map to something else. Now, the interviewing process is also where you start to set expectations. And this is, think, again, one of the other pieces we overlook. We just talk about the role and not how we are as a leader, not the way that we wanna engage with this role, not what the first kind of few months looks like, not how we evaluate success. That all really has to be part of the interview.

And for our leaders, when they come in, we want someone to know, hey, you are gonna be building out the whole strategy here, or you're gonna be taking an existing strategy that's great and evolving it and running that. Totally different roles, totally different sets of responsibilities. Or for a senior person, hey, you're gonna have this team under you to help execute, or you are going to have to do this from scratch, bring in the revenue to then build a team. I've seen that in companies big and small.

I was on a team at Google and we brought in a senior person to run some strategic work. And she had come from McKinsey where she had a whole team under her. And in this role, she didn't have a team. She was very seasoned, very senior, but because she didn't have a team, she felt like it was a total mismatch. Like, hey, I'm supposed to do all the strategic work and then do all the backend research. That's not what she had been used to. She hadn't done that level of

ground work for years and years in her career. And it just didn't feel like a fit. The expectations weren't set from the beginning. And I share that example because it truly can happen in companies, big or small. I see it all the time in small businesses as well. We bring in a manager, let's say you run a med spa or a salon and you bring in a director you want to oversee the whole facility. And

they are supposed to be holding folks accountable, but then you haven't given them any tools to do that, right? there's not reports and there's not expectation sets and people aren't really supposed to be, hitting any goals like yet. And so when the person comes in and implements that, there's a little bit of backlash. Now, if you want someone to set up that whole system, that needs to be clear to that person so they know what they're signing up for, right? Is it new or am I inheriting something? That's gonna be really key.

and all that expectation setting comes in the interview process. So the person knows like, do I wanna move forward with this or not? That is so critical because when someone starts and they were like, well, this isn't what I signed up for and you're thinking, yeah, it was, that's where we start to get that buyer's remorse on both sides. So now let's move into, got the interview, we got folks in the door. Well, how do we do that knowledge transfer or like getting someone literally in your brain? This is something that's difficult.

you brought in a senior person, you want them to already get it. You want them to already know how to do it. They have experience, they did this, they had a great track record somewhere else, right? Or they wouldn't be coming in as a senior role. It can be very frustrating to have to do this step, but without this step, it's very hard for someone to be successful. And that means they have to spend some time with you. You've got to put in a little bit of time. I'm not talking about years, I'm talking about days, okay? Maybe a couple of weeks, really.

hearing how you think, how you make decisions, how you approach certain tricky situations, what happens when this happens, what are some of the unexpected things that can come up. The more you talk through that and literally narrate your thought process as you're going through that, that is going to help someone be able to think, okay, this is the way they would think about that. So I wanna use this as a baseline. That's the expectation. Now I can add to that.

in some situations, maybe I can't, maybe this is the process and the protocol we want to follow. In your conversations, that's where you're going be downloading.

someone's never too senior to be able to shadow you if you need them to learn certain things about the business or the culture, about how you approach things.

incredibly valuable. And if you're,

person you hire is like, don't need to do that, then that's where we want to put that back into the interview process and say, hey, here's what the onboarding process looks like. we spend the first week or two together so we can really learn the ropes and start to get this shared brain state. That is important that someone's up for that. Now, if you are bringing in someone and you have no understanding of that side of the business, okay, so you're bringing in, you know, someone to run like you

a new department that you don't have any background or context or really opinion about, then maybe you're not telling them what to do for the role. But there is an amount of, hey, this is how we make decisions in this company. This is how the culture is. This is some of the things that, you know, are really important for me to be seeing. Let's figure out together how we define success. You still want to be getting a line around how some how you know if someone's being effective.

And because I think this is one of the trickier things. If we don't have any idea, like, let's say we brought in someone to run marketing because we have no idea how to do marketing. And we have no idea even how to know if it's successful or not, besides like that we made more money. Or if someone to run operations and the stuff takes longer to really kind of see the fruits of its labor, right? Like saving time and optimizing people is a little bit of a longer tail. If we know nothing about that and we look like, hey, why this thing costs this amount of money?

we're going to maybe misjudge that the person was or wasn't effective. So in this early days is when you're talking about, let's look at what are the next 90 days, maybe what the first six months looks like and how we know it's successful so that you get on the same page. And again, if you don't really understand the kind of nuts and bolts of the work, which bringing in a senior person, maybe you don't, like probably not potentially.

that's where you want to talk about it as a dialogue and say, okay, here's kind of what I'm thinking. Is this on track? Is this in line? You know, maybe you vet it with a couple other peers, right? A lot of times, or you bring in a coach or some of the consultants that kind of talk to you about. when I am working with my clients to figure out what some of these roles are, we talk about, what should the expectations be of that person, right? Because you also don't want to hire someone that says, it's going to take a year to see any results. And you're like,

I think it could be 90 days, but you know, want to be able to get aligned, but this is a partnership. And I encourage you to not interview someone or not bring someone on and then have them be trying out for their job again. Like that's not a good place to be. So you want to have them start with some degree of trust that like, hey, yeah, we were in this together. I trust that what you're gonna come back with is...

is reasonable and maybe aggressive if we're in a small business or a high pressure corporate team. We've got to have ambitious goals, but I am going to trust you to be setting those benchmarks because you are a seasoned leader. So these two pieces are critical. Really setting those expectations in the interview process and then making sure you're super aligned if there's a lot that you're kind of brain dumping and getting them to really understand how you operate, how you make decisions, or

if it's something that's not work that you had any responsibility over before, getting a line on what success looks like. This is a number of conversations. It doesn't take months and years to do this. These are critical, high leverage moments that are going to de-risk hiring because we all know it, hiring is expensive and time consuming. Did we know that it is a $1 trillion problem nationwide?

the cost of turnover costs businesses in the United States a trillion dollars a year worldwide. I think it's like 10 trillion, something ridiculous. Okay. Maybe two trillion, whatever it is, trillion is a lot. That is the cost. They say it costs between Gallup or LinkedIn reports, 50 % to 200 % of someone's salary. So if you bring in a key, like a senior hire, 150, $200,000.

that could be between $100,000 and $400,000 to replace that person. This is something you really wanna get right with your senior people. It is a pain in the butt to have to start from scratch and to feel that buyer's remorse staring down at a $400,000 price tag for getting this wrong. And the way we reduce the risk, it's not a guarantee, but the way we reduce the risk is by being thoughtful about the process.

meeting with more candidates so they can really evaluate it, having conversations around interview questions around the values fit, really setting expectations in the interview so that you make sure someone knows what they're signing up for and you know that person knows what they're signing up for, and then really making sure in the onboarding, you're getting aligned on what success looks like. I think that gets us like 80, 90 % of the way there.

And then of course, there's always margin of error. But on that price tag, how awesome would it be if we knew we had done everything we could? And that's what we do. Those couple of things, matter of conversations. And we go from there. And if you are interested in support for your team on how to map this out, especially with those interview questions, reach out, liagarvon.com slash contact. We will have a quick conversation, talk about what you're looking for, really how to structure.

the hiring process so that you are feeling like it's very objective, it makes sense, you're getting that full picture you need, and then building out that onboarding process. All right, liagarvin.com/contact See you next time.