the reflex.
Something's overwhelming the team. Orders are piling up, the inbox is a swamp, the reports are late. Someone in a meeting says the sentence, and everyone relaxes a little.
"We'll just hire someone."
It feels like a solution. It's a company that can afford to solve problems. But most of the time it isn't solving the problem. It's hiring the problem a full-time chair.
the bill nobody reads out loud.
A new hire is not a salary. That's the number on the offer letter, and it's the smallest part of the story.
You're also paying to recruit them, which eats weeks of a manager's calendar. You're paying for the ramp, the stretch of months where they're getting paid to still be confused. You're paying for the person who trains them, whose own work now moves slower. You're paying for a desk, a laptop, a seat in every tool with a per-user price. And you're paying the quiet tax of a bigger team, which is that a bigger team needs more coordinating, more meetings, more managing of the managing.
Then here's the part that actually stings. You didn't fix the broken process. You put a smart, motivated person on top of it. Now the mess has a defender. Suggest changing it later and you're not editing a workflow, you're threatening a job. The dysfunction just got an advocate with a mortgage.
Hiring to cover a broken process doesn't remove the problem. It promotes it, gives it benefits, and makes it harder to ever touch again.
when hiring is right, and when it isn't.
I'm not anti-hiring. Hire when the work is genuinely human. Judgment, relationships, taste, the messy calls a machine shouldn't make. Those roles are worth every penny and then some.
But look hard at what you're actually about to hire for. If the job description is really "move data from here to there, chase people for status, and copy the same numbers into the same tab every week," you're not describing a person. You're describing a system you haven't built yet.
The test I use is almost rude in how simple it is. Before you approve the req, ask: if this exact person quit in a year, what would we wish we'd built instead of backfilling them? Then consider building that thing now, before you've hired anyone, while the pain is still sharp enough to fund it.
the cheaper move.
Sometimes the right answer really is a new hire, and you make it with a clear head. Often the right answer is smaller and unglamorous. Wire two systems together. Delete a report. Give one person a tool that does the tedious 70 percent so they can spend their day on the part that needed a human all along.
That's not a headcount decision. It's a Tuesday afternoon and a little bit of nerve. It costs a fraction of a salary and it doesn't need onboarding.
The most expensive sentence in operations is the one that feels the cheapest to say.