Hiring is Broken

Over 46% of hires fail within the first 18 months. They’re terminated, subject to disciplinary action, given a significantly negative review, or they resign under pressure. The same research shows that only 19% of hires are considered an unequivocal success.

‍

That’s less than one in five.

‍

If any other core business process had an 81% failure rate, we’d swarm it. Leaders would dissect it, diagnose it, and fix it. But with hiring, most teams accept the dysfunction as a cost of doing business.

‍

In part, it’s because hiring feels like a distraction. Leaders see it as something that pulls them away from the “real work.” It’s ironic because building the right team is the real work. Leaders don’t build companies, they build teams who do.

‍

Many companies are trying to solve hiring inefficiency with AI. The explosion of AI tools in recruiting shows just how hungry people are for improvement, but the results have been unequivocally bad.

‍

This is because largely AI innovation in the space is sidestepping the core problem, the problem of getting clear on the role that we are actually hiring for. This is our mission with Hiroic - fix hiring by helping teams truly align on what they need. Everything else flows from this. 

‍

Instead what we today are companies using AI to draft generic job descriptions. Candidates using AI to tailor resumes to match those descriptions. Recruiters using AI to screen the AI-generated resumes. Each step adds a layer of haze to the process. Everyone is moving faster. No one is getting clearer.

‍

The process has become an arms race of automation. It is easier than ever to generate volume, and harder than ever to find signal in the noise. As a result, AI has not fixed hiring at all. Instead, it has accelerated the pace at which we make the same mistakes.

‍

I know this because I have lived it.

‍

At 19days, the venture studio that I co-founded, we have created more than 85 roles, screened over 13,000 applications, conducted nearly 2,000 phone screens and interviews, and hired 35 people.
‍

‍
Over time, we have watched application volume per role rise over 20x. We have seen resumes become more polished and more similar. We have experimented with tools designed to filter and rank candidates.

‍

None of the tools addressed the real problem.

‍

Hiring breaks long before a candidate ever submits an application. It breaks at the moment a team decides it needs to hire and assumes it already knows what it is looking for.

‍

Because that assumption is usually wrong.

‍

Most hiring processes presuppose clarity. They assume the team has a shared, accurate understanding of what success looks like in the role. In reality, that clarity rarely exists.

‍

There are several reasons for this:

‍

First, roles evolve faster than their documentation. Companies are dynamic systems. Strategy shifts. Teams evolve. Constraints change. Yet job descriptions remain static artifacts. When teams dust off an old description, they are hiring for the version of the role that existed months or years ago, not the one the company needs today.

‍

Second, stakeholders hold different ideas about the role. One person imagines a senior operator. Another imagines a hungry builder. One prioritizes depth in a specific technical skill. Another cares more about adaptability and culture. These differences are rarely surfaced and resolved. They stay implicit, creating friction throughout the hiring process. Interviews become inconsistent. Debriefs turn subjective. Decisions feel like compromises.

‍

Third, hiring feels urgent. When urgency rises, intentionality declines. A seat is empty. The workload is heavy. Momentum feels more important than precision. Teams default to vague requirements and start the motion of hiring because motion feels like progress. But speed without direction simply gets you to the wrong outcome faster.

‍

Fourth, most teams do not know how to excavate clarity even if they want to. Historically, the ability to extract and refine a precise definition of success has lived with experienced executive recruiters. That expertise is expensive and usually reserved for senior roles. For everyone else, teams wing it.

‍

Fifth, roles are often defined in terms of skills and experience rather than outcomes and constraints. Job descriptions list tools, years of experience, and buzzwords. They rarely articulate what success looks like six or twelve months in. They rarely clarify trade-offs, decision rights, or the behavioral patterns that matter under pressure.

‍

Finally, hiring is treated as a seat-filling exercise instead of a leverage decision. The goal becomes avoiding failure rather than designing a role that compounds the team’s strengths.

‍

All of these dynamics feed the same root issue - a lack of clarity.

‍

When clarity is missing at the beginning, every downstream step degrades. Job posts attract the wrong people. Screening becomes guesswork. Interviews rely on vibes. Decisions drift toward whoever feels “good enough.”

‍

That is how you end up with only 1 in 5 hires becoming a success.

‍

If hiring fails because clarity is missing upstream, then the solution is not faster screening or better keyword matching. The solution is better definition.

‍

The moment the need for a role arises is the moment the real work should begin. Before the job post. Before the recruiter. Before the applications.

‍

Teams need to define what success actually looks like in their current context. They need to articulate not just the skills required, but the outcomes expected. They need to clarify the attitudes and attributes that will allow someone to thrive. They need to surface disagreements and resolve them. They need to align.

‍

That is why we built Hiroic.

‍

Hiroic is an AI hiring expert designed to help teams achieve real role clarity quickly and effectively. Instead of writing generic job descriptions or ranking resumes, Hiroic collaborates with your team to extract the insights that are usually left unspoken.

‍

It interviews stakeholders by voice or text in a way that doesn’t require thoughts to be fully baked. It challenges assumptions. It pushes for specificity. It surfaces contradictions. It helps the team move from vague preferences to a structured definition of success.

‍

The output is not just a better job description. It is true Role Intelligence. A shared, precise model of what great looks like in that role, in your company, right now.

‍

When that clarity exists, everything changes.

‍

Candidates self-select more honestly. Screening becomes anchored to real criteria. Interviews become sharper and more consistent. Debriefs rely on shared standards instead of subjective impressions. New hires enter with clear expectations and a stronger chance of success.

‍

Hiring stops feeling like drudgery and starts feeling strategic. Each open role becomes an opportunity to examine where the company is going and how the team needs to evolve.

‍

We are early. We are still learning. Hundreds of people have taken the first step toward rethinking how they hire, but we are looking for partners who want to go deeper.

‍

If you have felt the frustration of high volume and low signal, if you have experienced interview fatigue or misaligned hiring teams, we want to work with you.

‍

We are looking for design partners who are willing to rethink hiring from the foundation up. People who want to experiment, give candid feedback, and help shape a better way forward.

‍

If that sounds like you, reach out. Let’s build a hiring process that is worthy of the teams we are trying to create.

‍

And if you are curious to watch this evolve in real time, subscribe to our newsletter. We are building in the open and would love to have you along for the journey.

‍