It’s Not the Bad Hires Holding You Back… It’s the Mediocre Ones
Let me start with a familiar story. Sandra, an IT manager, inherited a strong team from her predecessor. As the organization’s IT needs expanded, she had the opportunity to hire two new people. Like many hiring managers, Sandra had a clear vision: she wanted game-changers.
Yet as the process unfolded, competing voices and immediate pressures reshaped her priorities. The team was overwhelmed, and the safest choice seemed to be candidates who could step in quickly with deep technical expertise. Suddenly, Sandra found herself abandoning her big talent strategy and hiring two “safe” candidates, Rocco and Bennett. Both were industry veterans with extensive experience in relevant technology. Both had long tenure at their former employers and strong references for their knowledge and quality of output. The hiring team felt satisfied that the new hires would stabilize the present situation.
Fast forward three months, and Sandra realized the “safe” bets weren’t paying off. In fact, Bennett had become a detractor, pulling the team down with his negativity and lack of collaboration. He wasn’t picking up the slack as intended, instead making things harder for the team.
Sandra went to her boss and said, “I think I made the wrong hire. Bennett isn’t working out.” Her boss smiled. “We’ve all made them! Here’s the process for dealing with a bad hire. You’ll put him on a performance improvement plan, document the instances of negativity and poor collaboration, and set goals for him to work toward. If he can’t meet those goals in the designated timeframe, the next step will be to terminate him. You can begin confidentially reaching out to other candidates or your network to consider a replacement, should it come to that.”
Sandra was relieved. A few short months later, she had replaced Bennett with a high-quality candidate—someone new to the technical platform but eager to learn.
But what about Rocco? He wasn’t failing. His behavior wasn’t abrasive or detracting. And although there were areas Sandra would have liked him to improve, he delivered. He took easy tasks with a smile and could be counted on for accuracy, as long as Sandra set timelines that accounted for his perfectionism and gave him space to figure things out. Sandra adapted her leadership style to Rocco’s needs and adjusted her expectations accordingly. Her successor did the same. And the one after that….
Rocco was allowed to be mediocre, never truly challenged to raise the bar on performance. Twenty years later, as the organization’s needs had evolved dramatically, Rocco was still there, clinging to the tasks of yesterday. His newest boss wondered how on earth he had lasted this long and how the team had gotten to this point.
The hard truth is that it’s not the “bad hires” who undermine long-term strategy and organizational performance. It’s the mediocre hires. The safe hires. The hires who checked all the technical boxes but never really had the capacity or motivation to grow with the team’s needs, elevate performance, and contribute to the organization’s future.
Why do I say this? It’s simple: organizations know how to deal with bad hires. Sandra’s boss gave her a playbook, and her problem was remedied in less than a year. A bad hire is almost treated as a rite of passage: “we’ve all made them.” But very few organizations have well-routinized practices for dealing with mediocre hires. The default is to let them stay. Lower the bar. Hand them the tasks they can handle. Meanwhile, the game-changing talent strategy that was supposed to transform the team and add value to the business quietly slips away.
These employees may remain in roles for decades, but at what cost? They may not create chaos or outright failure, but the gap between what they’re doing and what a highly qualified candidate could be doing is massive. That’s where businesses self-sabotage: undermining their future by under-resourcing critical positions.
Making strong hiring decisions is paramount, but not easy. Hiring must be treated as a strategic lever, not a compliance exercise. That means:
- A clear definition of success for each role, aligned with long-term strategy.
- Robust hiring processes with structured interviews, standardized comparisons, and tools to evaluate more than just technical fit.
- Training for hiring managers to gather relevant data and assess growth capacity, not just today’s skills.
- Analytics to measure outcomes and track the effectiveness of hiring decisions.
Most organizations have systems for fixing mistakes, but very few have systems for preventing mediocrity. That’s the blind spot.
The truth is: the future of your organization depends less on avoiding bad hires and more on ensuring every hire raises the bar. Every day a mediocre hire stays in place is a day of lost opportunity. The cost is invisible but compounding: missed innovation, slowed progress, weakened culture.
With Vantage’s Hiring Effectiveness Suite, you can stop settling and start securing the kind of talent that shapes the future.