Hiring Right – Your First Line of Defence

How to Win with More Talent – One Hire at a Time

By Angela Lane & Sergey Gorbatov

When it comes to driving performance through talent, hiring isn’t the whole story—but often it is where the story begins.

Depending on your industry and your organization’s growth, you may only be hiring a few people externally in any given year. But don’t write it off as insignificant. Think about a bad hire that you or someone else made and the impact it had on the whole team and the wider organization. So, hiring plays a disproportionately important role in shaping your future workforce. And, as a business leader, hiring is the first line of defense in your talent strategy.

If talent management is about gaining advantage by having the right skills at the right place at the right time—then hiring is about securing the raw materials you need. People who can perform today, but also with the ability to grow. It’s your insurance policy against an unknown future.

That’s why our principle is simple: 

Every hire is better than the talent they replace.

Better skills. Better potential. Better learning agility. Because once someone is in the system, you’ll invest in developing them. But that investment only pays off if they have the capacity to grow.

Your goal isn’t just to fill roles—it’s to deliver results today and improve the talent quality of the organization over time. Savvy leaders navigate this now/future tension well. That starts with understanding the role that’s being filled: what great looks like, what the incumbent delivered, and where there’s room to expect more. It requires knowing the market: what’s available, what’s affordable, and what tradeoffs are in play. And it requires discipline: not compromising under pressure, and not confusing speed with quality.

When you hire well, the entire talent system improves. Managers spend less time managing poor performance. Development efforts go further, faster. Mobility accelerates. Culture strengthens. And new hires can set a new standard—helping everyone raise their game.

In short, better (talent) in means better (performance) out.

Leaders who understand this don’t treat hiring as a transaction—they treat it as a strategic imperative. They set a high standard and never settle. Not because it’s idealistic, but because it’s pragmatic.

So while hiring may not be the biggest part of your talent strategy, it’s the one that sets the ceiling. And if you raise that ceiling, everything else gets better too.

Define Standards, Lead Outcomes

• Define "what great looks like" for every critical role—benchmark based on performance and potential. Hire for intelligence and learning agility. Because you can’t teach these.

• Hold the line under pressure. Don’t compromise standards when demand is urgent. Quality over speed.

• Leverage assessment tools strategically—mistakes are costly. Having more information is just smart.

• Maintain final accountability for talent decisions—even when HR executes. Performance starts with you.

  
  

Bottom Line: Hire Better, Perform Better

Great talent is a result of leadership commitment to quality. In industries with constrained candidate pools and heightened competition, it is easy to compromise. But every hire defines your future capability. It either strengthens your future—or sabotages it. Leaders who win don’t leave hiring to chance or convenience. They obsess over quality, because they know that people decisions are performance decisions. You can’t develop your way out of a bad hire. So stop settling. Start building. 

If you’re serious about driving performance through talent, start by upgrading your hiring bar. Raise the standard now—because the team you’re building today is the business you’ll be running tomorrow.

The opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and not those of any associated organisations or institutions.