Sometimes the interview just flows.

You grew up twenty minutes apart, or you went to the same school, or it turns out you have a friend in common, and the hour just goes by fast.

Then the team weighs in, and everyone liked the candidate. So it stops feeling like a judgment call and starts feeling like an obvious yes.

But what you did was hire the conversation, not the job.

Six months later you're paying severance and the role you needed filled is still empty.

That's the anatomy of a bad hire, and it almost always starts with the same common hiring mistakes.

I've made most of these mistakes myself across 20+ years of hiring at The Motley Fool, The Hustle, HubSpot, and Hampton. Some of them more than once, which is why I want to make sure I share them with you.

Because here's the thing: none of these are incredibly wild mistakes.

They're the ordinary, reasonable-feeling decisions you make when you're tired, stretched, or just want the problem to be solved.

A few happen before you've written a word of the job description (JD): the title you quickly slap on the role, the comp range you set, the person you picture hiring.

And a few happen at the finish line, when you're staring at two finalists and desperate to be done.

But every one traces back to the same root: letting exhaustion, ego, or impatience outrank the process.

Here's where it goes wrong, and what to do instead.

The short version: the nine mistakes are writing the JD before defining the problem, title inflation, misaligned compensation, cloning yourself, hiring the conversation instead of the job, winging the interviews, showing up in round four, confusing urgency with importance, and hiring for relief instead of results.

You need help, so you open a template and start typing "Senior Marketing Manager." Feels productive, but it isn’t.

A vague role attracts vague candidates, and everything downstream inherits that vagueness.

So before you write a word of the JD, answer these five questions:

If you can’t answer all five, you’re not ready to post the job. (These are the five questions in Step 1 of Start the Hire, a free fillable workbook. It walks you through answering them properly.)

Calling someone "Head of Marketing" when what you really need is a marketing coordinator or strong individual contributor (IC) is a huge mistake. Big titles create expectations around scope, authority, and compensation.

Once someone has the title, unwinding it later is incredibly awkward. And when you eventually need a real Head of Marketing, you've created a political problem inside your own company.

Make sure you actually know the difference between an IC, a manager, a senior manager, a director, VP, and c-suite.

Founders often want senior outcomes on junior budgets.

If you're hiring a "Head of Marketing" and trying to pay $100K, don't be surprised by the disappointing talent pool you get.

Good candidates know the market, and nothing turns off a good candidate more than a big title and a weak (or non-existent) comp range.

The fix is simple: sanity-check compensation before you start the search.

There are plenty of free resources (Pave, public salary bands, even AI) to understand what roles actually pay.

Then design the role within that reality.

You want someone who thinks like you, works like you, and cares like you?

The problem is, that person doesn't exist. And even if they did, they'd start their own company.

And a clone doesn't just copy your strengths. They copy your blind spots. You don't need another you; you need someone who's sharp exactly where you're weak.

Hire for the specific capabilities the role requires, not for a mini-me.

The interview was energizing. You talked for 90 minutes and it felt like 20. You came out saying "I just have a good feeling."

This is the vibe hire, and it's the most common mistake on this list.

Chemistry tells you how someone interviews, but it tells you nothing about how they work. And this is how you end up with a bad hire for six months, because you genuinely like them, so you hesitate to let them go.

The fix: score every interview against defined criteria, minus-2 to plus-2, evidence required. If you can't point to something the candidate actually said or did to justify the score, you don't have a signal. You have a mood.

A scorecard converts opinion into evidence. It's the fastest way to catch yourself mid-vibe-hire.

Winging it means different questions for every candidate, whatever came to mind; and they’ll mostly be questions the candidate has answered 50 times already.

You can't compare candidates you evaluated on different tests.

In the largest re-analysis of a century of hiring research (Sackett et al., 2022), structured interviews predicted job performance better than any other method, including cognitive ability tests.

Unstructured ones scored less than half as well. Same room, same hour, half the signal.

Run structured interviews instead: same questions, same order, every candidate, scored as you go. Ask for evidence, not opinions. "Walk me through the last time you did this" beats "how would you handle this" every single time, because the past tense is way harder to fake.

And follow the 70/30 rule: 70% of each interview should be the same questions across each candidate, and 30% can be customized to their experience.

Your team runs the early interviews and then you parachute in at the end to bless the finalist or make the ultimate “call”.

Trust me, that’s backwards.

By round four, strong candidates have competing offers and your team has already burned 10+ hours per candidate. You've outsourced the most important call your company makes this quarter, and you're too late to close the great ones.

Flip the script: the founder runs the first call and the last call. Fifteen minutes with you filters better than four hours of team interviews. And if the candidate is great, you start selling them on day one instead of week three.

When I switched to founder-first, founder-last, my time-to-hire dropped from 62 days to 38. The strong candidates stopped taking other offers mid-process.

Yes, you need help now.

But a bad hire costs a few months of salary, at least, plus the opportunity cost of lost time. Taking four extra weeks to find the right person is almost always worth it.

An empty seat is a known, contained cost.

A wrong hire is an unknown, compounding one.

You'll manage them, then coach them, then exit them, and end up hiring for the same role anyway, only more tired and further behind. Even though it feels like having the seat empty is going to kill you, it won't. But having to refill it might.

You're exhausted, so you hire the first competent person who shows up.

Another version of this: you get down to the final two candidates and neither one is really "the one," but the idea of restarting the search feels unbearable.

The sunk cost fallacy kicks in. You've already interviewed 20 people, you've spent weeks on this, and you just want the problem solved.

So you settle.

That's how you end up with a $90K employee doing the work of a $40K one, because you were exhausted and looking for relief.

The truth is, sometimes you do all the right things and still don't end up with a great candidate.

It happens — but that’s still not an excuse to settle.

Start over, refresh, build a new pipeline.

Notice the through-line: every one of these feels like the smart, reasonable call in the moment you make it. That's exactly what makes them dangerous.

Nobody title-inflates or settles on purpose. It always looks like pragmatism at the time.

So when you catch yourself rationalizing a settle, inflating a title to close someone, or promising you'll "fix the comp later," treat that feeling as the signal, not the answer.

That's the moment to slow down and trust the system you built when you were thinking clearly, not the one you're tempted to abandon because you're tired. And if you haven't built that system yet? That's the real fix. Not one mistake at a time, but a process that makes all nine hard to commit.

Which brings us back to that hire from the top of this article.

The one where the interview flowed and everyone was excited.

A system wouldn't have made that conversation less fun. It just would've made sure the fun wasn't the deciding vote.

Get the system: Start the Hire (free)

Most of these nine mistakes get decided before the job post goes up. Start the Hire is the fillable workbook that fixes that part: define the role, lock your non-negotiables, write a JD that sells. Plus the 10 Red Flags checklist for when the charming candidate shows up. Three steps, one sitting, free.

Send me the workbook →

Ten minutes, nine questions, one per mistake:

Any "no" is where your next bad hire is already scheduled to come from. Fix it before you post the job. Every one of these fixes takes less time than one bad-hire month.

What is the #1 reason for bad hiring? Hiring without a defined role. When you can't articulate the specific problems the hire should solve and what success looks like in 90 days, every downstream step runs on vibes: the JD, the title, the comp, the interviews, the decision. The interview-chemistry trap gets the blame, but vague role definition is what lets it happen.

What is the 70/30 rule in hiring? Before you even begin interviewing, create your CORE questions - these are the questions you will ask across each candidate, in each round. Those should comprise 70% of the questions you ask; the other 30% are customized to each candidate and their experience.

How much does a bad hire actually cost? For a founder-led company, $100K is the floor once you count severance, the vacant seat, management time, team disruption, and restarting the search. For senior roles, it's a multiple of that.

What are the 5 C's of interviewing? There's no standard version. Search it and you'll find half a dozen different lists, most written for candidates preparing for interviews rather than founders running them. Frameworks like this are fine as memory aids, but they only work when you score them with evidence. Five C's evaluated by gut feel is still a vibe hire with better vocabulary.

Jordan DiPietro has spent 20+ years hiring for The Motley Fool, The Hustle, HubSpot, and Hampton, and is the creator of Hiring OS, the opinionated hiring system for growth-stage founders.

Related reading:

Looking For More?

—> Here are 3 ways I can help you: