Leaders of SMEs: let’s talk about “strategic hiring.”
It’s a term most people have heard. It sounds sensible, and it’s easy to agree with. But in practice, very little hiring is actually strategic.
In most organisations, hiring is reactive. Something breaks, someone leaves, the team is stretched, and a role is opened to solve the immediate problem. The process may be structured, but the thinking behind it rarely is.
Strategic hiring looks different. It starts before the vacancy exists. But what does it really mean to be following a strategic hiring process?
It means the leadership team is thinking about capability as part of how the business evolves, not just when pressure forces a decision. Roles are defined from first principles, based on what the organisation needs now and over the next 12 to 24 months, rather than copied from the last time a similar position was filled.
It also requires clarity on what “good” actually looks like before the process begins. Not just in terms of experience or qualifications, but in terms of outcomes, behaviours, and how the role fits into the wider system.
And it doesn’t stop at the offer stage. Onboarding is part of hiring. A hire is not complete when someone joins. It is complete when they are contributing meaningfully within the organisation.
On the surface, this sounds like a hiring problem. In reality, it rarely is that simple.
What sits underneath hiring is a set of deeper organisational questions — around leadership, structure, decision-making, culture, capability, and execution. If those are unclear, hiring becomes a way of compensating for a system that hasn’t been properly designed.
Most organisations don’t have a hiring problem. They have a clarity problem.
If that sounds familiar, this is exactly what the Organisational Health Audit is designed to surface. It looks across seven dimensions of your organisation to identify where your people strategy is working — and where it is working against you.