Hiring: Mastering the Most Important Decision
No decision a manager makes matters more than who they hire — and almost none of them were ever taught how to do it well.
Think about the last hire on your team that didn’t work out. Odds are the decision felt right at the time. Someone was impressive in the room, the conversation flowed, everyone left with a good feeling. A few months later, it was clear something was off.
Hiring is arguably the single most consequential decision a leader makes. Get it right and a team gets stronger; get it wrong and you drain time, money, and morale — some estimates put the cost of a bad hire at anywhere from a third to double the person’s annual salary, once you add up recruiting, lost productivity, and the disruption to everyone around them. And yet most managers were never trained to hire. Their entire model for how to interview comes from having once been interviewed themselves.
CoachingOurselves has just released a new peer-learning topic to change that: “Hiring: Mastering the Most Important Decision,” authored by Brigitte Skeene. Brigitte is the founder of Talent IQ and Engagés, and she has spent 27 years in human resources and talent acquisition — locally and internationally, including work with leading firms such as Korn Ferry. She’s distilled that experience into a single 85-minute session your managers run together.
Why hiring? Why now?
Talent is scarce, the skills a role needs are changing faster than ever, and the pressure to fill an empty seat quickly is relentless. That pressure is exactly what nudges good managers into bad habits — deciding on gut, hiring people who remind them of themselves, and chatting their way through interviews instead of genuinely comparing candidates. Decades of research (going back to the classic Schmidt and Hunter studies) keep finding the same thing: a structured interview, where every candidate is asked the same job-relevant questions, is about twice as good at predicting who will actually succeed as an open-ended conversation. The instinct that feels so reliable is, more often than not, the blind spot.
What managers work through in the session
This isn’t a lecture on recruitment. It’s a guided conversation where managers hold their own hiring habits up to the light and leave with tools they’ll actually use. Together they explore:
— Instinct, the biggest blind spot — why “I just had a good feeling about them” is so often where hiring goes wrong;
— The “culture fit” trap — how “fit” quietly becomes bias, and how hiring for “culture add” brings in the differences a team actually needs. (Brigitte tells the story of a candidate rejected as a poor “fit” — who went on to build WhatsApp.)
— Defining the real need — looking past the old job description to what the organization, the team, and the position each require;
— A team competency gap analysis — a simple grid that reveals where your team is thin and what your next hire should truly bring;
— Must-haves vs. nice-to-haves — building a focused, honest shortlist instead of chasing a “perfect” candidate who doesn’t exist;
— Structured interviews — turning hiring from a gut call into a fair, repeatable, strategic advantage.
Why learn this in a peer conversation?
Because hiring judgment isn’t something you absorb from a slide deck. It’s a tacit skill, built the way managers build most of their skills — through real experience and by learning from each other. (The well-known 70-20-10 rule captures it: roughly 90% of how managers develop comes from doing the work and talking it through with peers, and only about 10% from formal training.) Hiring mistakes are especially hard to spot in yourself. Put a handful of managers around a table, though, and something useful happens: they compare how they read the same situations, hear how a peer handled the trap they just described, and rehearse sharper questions out loud. Private, bias-prone instinct becomes shared, examinable practice. That’s exactly what a CoachingOurselves session is built to do — and it’s why peer, cohort-based learning has become the most trusted way organizations grow their leaders.
What makes it so useful
— Created by a 27-year talent-acquisition practitioner, not a textbook
— Runs as a standalone 85-minute workshop, or slots into a larger leadership program — and scales across your organization with train-the-trainer certification
— Sends managers off with tools they’ll reuse — the competency grid also works for project assignments and development planning
— Honest, reflective, and practical — built for real conversation, not theory
— Flexible — works for anyone who hires, across roles and teams
Want to learn more?
The best way to see whether this fits your people is a short conversation. Book a time with Warren — he’ll walk you through how the topic works, how to get started, and answer anything you’re wondering about. You can also download an excerpt to see a session for yourself.
“Hiring: Mastering the Most Important Decision” is available for immediate use in your leadership group sessions if you already have a CoachingOurselves account.
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