Will Your Next Employee Create Value or Hide Problems?
When a company has too much work, hiring a new person seems like the logical solution.
Sales cannot respond to customers in time – a new salesperson is needed.
Projects are late – a project manager is needed.
The manager is overloaded – an assistant is needed.
Customers ask too many questions – customer support needs to be expanded.
Marketing is not producing enough results – a marketing manager is needed.
Sometimes a new person really is the right solution.
But very often, someone is hired not to create new value for the company, but to take responsibility for a problem that management has been unable or unwilling to solve.
A new employee may reduce the visible workload.
That does not mean they remove its real cause.
Hiring someone is one of the most expensive ways to diagnose a problem
If a company does not know precisely why work is piling up, it does not know what kind of person it actually needs.
It sees the symptom:
- tasks remain unfinished; - customer responses are delayed; - managers have no time; - errors recur; - sales fluctuate; - projects exceed their budgets; - people are overworked.
The simplest explanation is that there are too few people.
But work may also pile up because:
- the company has too many priorities; - activities are being performed that are not needed at all; - the same information is entered into several systems; - decisions await management approval; - the process is poorly designed; - accountability is unclear; - the wrong customers generate too many exceptions; - an existing employee is in the wrong role; - an employee cannot perform their job; - management constantly changes direction; - a problematic product creates recurring work for customer support.
If a new person is hired instead of investigating these causes, the problem does not disappear.
There is simply one more person helping to deal with its consequences.
A new employee can make a bad system tolerable
This is the most dangerous part.
If a new person can reduce the workload for a while, management loses the pressure to fix the real problem.
An assistant helps a manager handle too many unimportant activities. The manager therefore does not need to decide which should stop.
A project manager manually holds a flawed process together. The company therefore does not need to improve the process itself.
A customer support employee answers questions continually generated by a poorly designed product. The real cause therefore never reaches product development.
A new salesperson finds more leads even though the company’s value proposition is unclear. Management therefore does not need to decide what is actually being sold and to whom.
The person may be excellent at their job.
But if their main task is to compensate for weaknesses in the system through personal effort, the company is not building capability. It is turning inefficiency into a permanent cost.
The volume of work does not prove that a new role is needed
Companies often create new roles around existing activities.
They look at what nobody currently has time to do, collect those activities into a job description, and begin looking for someone.
This creates jobs with many tasks but no clear outcome.
The new person must:
- help with marketing; - support sales; - coordinate projects; - communicate with partners; - organise data; - maintain documentation; - deal with day-to-day issues; - take on other tasks as needed.
Such a role may clear a manager’s desk, but nobody knows what specific value it creates for the company.
A good role does not begin with the question: “Which activities can we give this person?”
It begins with the question: “Which outcome will this person be accountable for?”
If the outcome cannot be stated clearly, the role has probably not yet been thought through well enough.
Hiring can conceal a lack of strategy
An unclear strategy creates a great deal of work.
If a company has not chosen the right customer, it serves very different customers.
If it has not decided which problem it solves best, it develops several different solutions at once.
If it has not chosen its priorities, every function launches new projects.
People then become overloaded.
Management may interpret this as a growth problem and hire more employees.
But new people do not create strategic clarity.
They simply perform more activities arising from choices that were never made.
The more people are added to such a company, the harder it becomes to change direction later. Every project gains an owner, every activity a budget, and every function a reason why its work must continue.
Strategic indecision becomes organisational structure.
Before hiring someone new, it is therefore worth asking whether the workload is genuinely caused by too few people or by management’s inability to say “no” to something.
Hiring can conceal a flawed process
If one stage of work constantly creates a queue, this does not automatically mean it needs more people.
The problem may arise at an earlier stage.
Customer support, for example, may be overloaded because sales makes inaccurate promises to customers.
Project managers may be overloaded because accountability within the team is unclear.
The finance department may do too much manual work because data is entered differently across separate systems.
Developers may constantly fix errors because requirements change during the work and quality control happens too late.
If a person is added only where the problem becomes visible, the company increases its capacity to handle consequences.
Its capacity to generate the problem remains unchanged.
Before hiring, examine the entire workflow:
- Where does the work originate? - Who decides that it needs to be done? - What information does the work require? - Where does waiting occur? - Where are errors made? - Which work must be redone later? - Which steps can be removed? - What can be automated? - Why does the problem reach this role at all?
A new person is the right solution only when the work itself is necessary, the process is sensible, and existing capacity is genuinely insufficient.
Hiring can conceal the wrong customer
All customers generate revenue, but not all customers create value for the company.
Some require so many bespoke solutions, explanations, corrections, and so much management attention that their true cost to serve exceeds the revenue they generate.
When more such customers arrive, workload grows rapidly.
The company may respond by hiring new people. The entire organisation then begins adapting to customers who should not be part of its model in the first place.
Instead of asking why certain customers create so much work, people are hired to perform that work.
The result may be growing revenue, a growing team, and shrinking profit.
Before hiring, identify which customers are causing the workload:
- Are they part of our real target group? - Does their need fit our core service? - How many exceptions do they require? - Does their price cover the full cost of serving them? - Will the same work arise with future customers? - Would the problem disappear if we changed the offer or pricing? - Should we stop serving certain customers altogether?
Sometimes a company does not need a new employee.
It needs fewer of the wrong customers.
Hiring can conceal a poor fit with an existing employee
A team’s workload may not be high because there are too few people.
Sometimes the reason is that one person cannot carry the responsibility assigned to them.
Others check their work, correct errors, remind them about tasks, resolve conflicts, and take over the work as deadlines approach.
From the outside, the whole team appears overloaded.
A manager may hire another person to solve the problem. In reality, an additional support system is being built around one poor role fit.
This is an uncomfortable issue for managers because hiring a new person feels more humane than honestly assessing an existing role or performance.
But if a company hires new people to compensate for someone’s missing capability, it pays for the same work several times.
The right question is not only: “Do we have enough people?”
It must also ask:
- Are the right people in the right roles? - Does each person have the necessary expertise? - Can they work with the required independence? - Does their work create clarity or additional work for others? - Is the problem the person, the role, management, or a mismatch between them? - Would training or changing the role solve the problem? - Is management avoiding a decision that is already clear?
One strong person in the right role can reduce the workload of the entire team.
One person in the wrong role can create work for many others.
Hiring can conceal a manager’s need for control
A manager may be overloaded not because the company lacks people, but because every decision must pass through them.
They review proposals, approve small expenses, participate in every project, correct other people’s work, and insist on being included in customer communication.
They then hire an assistant or another manager to help manage the burden.
But if decision-making authority remains with the CEO, the new person cannot truly free them.
They can gather information, prepare decisions, and organise the calendar. The final work still reaches the manager’s desk.
A company can therefore hire more and more people without reducing the management bottleneck.
Before hiring someone new, the manager should ask:
- Which decisions do I still make even though someone else could make them? - Do existing employees genuinely have the authority to decide? - Do I assess the outcome, or insist that the work be done my way? - Do people seek approval because they lack ability, or because I have taught them not to take risks? - Does my workload require a new person or a different way of managing?
Sometimes a manager does not need an assistant.
They simply need to stop performing activities and making decisions that should no longer belong to them.
Every new person also increases the company’s complexity
The cost of an employee is not limited to their salary.
Every new person requires:
- recruitment; - onboarding; - management; - work equipment; - access permissions; - information; - feedback; - collaboration with other people; - a place in the company’s decision-making and accountability system.
They add new communication channels and dependencies to the organisation.
When the role is clear and the person creates significant value, this is a sensible investment.
When the role is unclear, the company gains another person whose work must be coordinated with others and whose results are difficult to assess.
The need for a new employee should therefore not be assessed solely by salary cost.
The cost of management, coordination, and increasing complexity must also be considered.
The new person must create more value than the entire system expends because of their presence.
When does a new person genuinely create value?
A new employee is justified when the company can clearly describe the important outcome for which they will become accountable.
This means that before recruitment begins, the company knows:
- which business outcome the role creates; - why that outcome matters to the company’s objective; - which problem the new person removes; - why the problem cannot be solved by stopping, simplifying, or automating work; - why existing employees cannot reasonably carry this responsibility; - which expertise the role requires; - which decision-making authority the person must have; - which indicators will be used to assess their success; - how much value the role should create relative to its total cost; - who will help the person become effective and how.
A new person may join to operate an existing system.
They may also join to build a missing system.
Both are valid reasons if the expected outcome is clear.
“We have too much work” is not yet a sufficient reason to hire.
“We need someone who will build a repeatable customer support process within six months, reduce recurring problems, and take accountability for customer resolution time” is a real role.
Ten questions before hiring your next employee
Before starting recruitment, management should answer ten questions.
- Which specific outcome will the new person be accountable for?
- Why is that outcome not being achieved now?
- Is the cause of the problem workload, process, priorities, expertise, tools, or management?
- Which part of the work should stop before hiring?
- Which work can be simplified or automated?
- Is the need for the work permanent or temporary?
- Would redistributing accountability among existing employees solve the problem?
- Will the new role create measurable value for the customer or the company?
- Will the person have the decision-making authority needed to achieve the outcome?
- What will be better in the company six months from now because this particular person was hired?
If these questions do not have clear answers, the need to recruit has not yet been thought through well enough.
The right employee does not simply fill a vacancy
The right employee increases the company’s capability.
They do not merely take on tasks. They create an outcome that the company was previously unable to achieve well enough, quickly enough, or consistently enough.
They may remove a bottleneck, build a missing function, bring necessary expertise into the company, or free other people to do work in which they create more value.
But even an excellent person cannot fix a role whose purpose is unclear, which lacks decision-making authority, and which conceals several unresolved management problems.
Before looking for a person, the company must therefore understand what kind of company it is building with their help.
Is their task to increase the company’s capacity to create value?
Or to make the existing confusion more tolerable for a while?
Hiring a new person may seem like a quick solution.
But if the real problem remains, that solution becomes a fixed monthly cost.
Sometimes the company’s right next decision is to hire an excellent person.
Sometimes the right decision is to stop unnecessary work, improve a process, change accountability, or admit that someone is in the wrong role.
A manager’s job is to distinguish between these situations before adding a new person to the problem.
Mikk OrglaanChalleng.ist