Hiring is a bet.

Life is complicated. It's full of people wanting the same thing, or wanting completely different things. There are plenty of opinions out there, conflicting motivations, a bit of bluffing here and there, and information nobody hands you outright. We are constantly asked to decide, to pull one of a million interconnected levers, or follow one path (the path!), without ever fully knowing where it will really take us, or even worse, where the rest of them lead. On top of that, we're asked to hire someone for a team whose dynamics are very hard to define, within an organization we don't fully understand, in a very competitive business where things change all the time. Under those circumstances, we're asked to predict who is, and will be, the best person for the job, out of several dozen, sometimes hundreds, of candidates, where at least sixty percent share the exact same profile under a heavily standardized artifact called a CV (or résumé!), all heavily coached to show innovation, proactivity, resilience, humble leadership, positive attitude (....etcétéra!), and to say the right thing in a behavioral interview that asks open questions like to tell me about a time you did this or that, where the one answer you're never allowed to give is I don't know, or I'm not sure, or I never did this or that.

I've always been interested in how people make decisions, individually and in groups, in families, teams, organizations, countries, in society at large. Hiring is one of those decisions that has always pulled me in, not just because of how hard it is to get right, but because of how delayed the feedback loop is, how long it actually takes to learn whether a decision was good, and how much impact, for a team, for a business, a single decision can have.

Every time I'm advising a hiring manager on which candidate to choose from a shortlist of three or four promising finalists, I keep coming back to the same realization:

Hiring is a bet, and the goal is to make it as good, as informed, a bet as possible.

In hiring, like in betting, you don't control whether you win. You control how good the bet is, how cheaply you lose when you lose, and whether you keep your nerve afterward.

The Stoics have a name for this: the dichotomy of control. The image usually used to explain it is an archer and an arrow. You don't get to control whether the arrow lands. You only get to control how well you aimed. Everything before the release (the form, the aim, the read on the wind) belongs to the archer. What the arrow does after that doesn't.

This doesn't map onto hiring perfectly, but the core of the analogy holds well enough to be a useful way to think about hiring: every hire is an arrow. Every hiring decision is a bet. You don't get to control whether the person turns out to be the right one. You only get to control how well you aimed before you let go.

And that distinction matters, maybe more than any other idea in this piece, because most of what goes wrong in hiring comes from confusing the two: the quality of the aim with the quality of the landing.

Confuse them one way, and a good decision that ran into bad luck gets treated as a mistake, so a sound process gets torn apart and rebuilt for no reason. Confuse them the other way, and a bad decision that got lucky gets treated as proof of good instincts, so a sloppy process gets kept exactly as it is.

Either way, you end up managing the wrong variable, and you never actually get better at hiring. You just get better at telling yourself a story about it afterward.

The Only Thing You Actually Control

Most of the time you offer someone a position, you're betting on a person you don't fully know, for a role you can't fully simulate, using information that is permanently incomplete. That's not a design flaw in the hiring process. That's life, and life runs on this kind of decision. No amount of extra interviews erases the uncertainty.

However, what you can do is narrow the gap. Control the aim. How much real information you gather before you release the arrow. How well you manage your own bias while gathering it. How deliberately you build a process that helps you tell the difference between hiring the person you like and hiring the person who is right for the job, which are not always, and sometimes not even often, the same thing.

The process, the recipe, the craft of hiring, however you want to name it, is what's actually yours to control. Get it right consistently, and you win more often than you lose, over time, across many hires.

To get good at focusing on what you can actually control, there are three separate tasks to stay alert to. They don't happen at the same time, and mixing them up is usually where a hiring process quietly breaks down, and where we lose control of the practice altogether.

1. Build a Better Bet

This is the job that happens before the offer, entirely about the aim, and it's the one most people actually mean when they say "we need a better hiring process." From my experience, three things move the needle here;

• First, gather more of the information that's actually available, not more information in general, but the kind that predicts performance. Reference calls, resumes, the questions asked in the interview itself, all of it can go deeper than it usually does. Push past your own comfort zone here. From Kahnemn's "Thinking, Fast and Slow, " work to go past System 1 and toward something slower and more deliberately skeptical like System 2. Being a little uncomfortably curious is the point.
• Second, and closely related, identify and control for the bias sitting in the room. A calibrated panel, a defined bar agreed on before anyone meets the candidate, a scorecard that forces the same criteria across every interviewer, all of it exists for one reason: to keep "I just liked them" from doing the work that evidence should be doing.
• Third, stay anchored to what the job actually requires, to what successful performance actually looks like, not to what looks impressive on paper. Pedigree, a familiar brand name, a great handshake (ha! 😉)... these are proxies, and proxies are what fill the gap when real signal is missing. Replacing proxies with evidence isn't caution for its own sake. It's improving the aim.

None of this guarantees the arrow lands. It just means you've stopped shooting blind, and that alone meaningfully improves your odds of hitting the target.

2. Lose Better

This one isn't about the outcome. It's about how the decision is built to minimize the damage when things go wrong.

Losing better, in hiring, means designing a process, a safety net, that when it does fail, fails toward more false negatives than false positives.

A false positive, a Type I error, means you bet on someone who turns out to be the wrong hire. A false negative, a Type II error, means you passed on someone who would have been right.

I don't think these two mistakes get treated differently, or put another way, avoiding one gets treated as being just as important as avoiding the other, and that's usually where hiring processes go wrong. A bad hire in a leadership role doesn't just cost a salary. It costs the team that reports to them, the culture they set for a year or two, the guests who feel the difference, the disruption of removing them, and the opportunity cost of whoever else could have had that seat. A passed-over candidate costs you an upside you never got to see. Real, but contained. Nothing detonates on the way out.

If you're going to lose, lose the cheap way. Being at peace with Type II errors isn't resignation, and it isn't lowering the bar. It's a decision made in advance about which kind of wrong you'd rather live with.

That's really the point of a rigorous process. Not to catch every good candidate, that's not possible, but to deliberately steer failure away from the expensive kind and toward the kind you can survive.

3. When You Lose Anyway

Sometimes the arrow lands badly no matter how good the aim was. Sometimes the bet looks stupid in hindsight. This is the hardest part, because it asks you to separate how the decision was made from how it turned out.

Annie Duke, in "Thinking in Bets", asks us to avoid "resulting": judging a decision purely by its result.

It's tempting, after a bad hire, to believe the warning signs were there all along, sitting in plain view, and that the team simply chose to ignore them.

That's rarely what actually happened, and it's a little absurd when you say it out loud. Nobody sits across from a candidate, sees the red flags clearly, and hires them anyway just to sabotage the team. What actually happened is simpler and far less dramatic. The decision was made with the information available at the time, and the outcome later revealed things that information never contained.

Bad decisions are invisible going in and perfectly obvious coming out. That's not insight. That's memory doing what memory always does once it already knows the ending.

The recommendation isn't to trust the process blindly. An honest, disciplined audit should happen every so often, and especially after a bad outcome. What went wrong? Did you actually gather real information, or shortcut it under deadline pressure? Did the panel apply the scorecard, or did someone's enthusiasm quietly overrule it in the room?

If the process really was followed, the aim really was sound, then and the right move is to stay put and shoot again.

This is one of the most important things to get right, not just in hiring, but in decisions generally: in stocks, in bets, in life. Tearing up a sound process because one arrow missed doesn't make you smarter. It makes you superstitious.

It's also worth remembering, here more than anywhere, that hiring isn't quite as final as a single arrow release. It has more in common with investing than with archery. You make the initial decision, but you don't just walk away from it afterward. Onboarding, coaching, the support a manager gives in the first few months, all of that is active management of the position you just took. That's not a loophole for a bad process to hide behind. It's a reason to keep aiming well on the way in, and to keep managing the outcome on the way out, instead of doing neither and blaming the wind for both.

Conclusion

Hiring is a game of incomplete information, played with competing interests and more stakeholders than anyone would design on purpose if they were starting from scratch. Bad outcomes aren't proof the system failed. They're the predictable cost of playing a game where the other side is holding cards you'll never see.

What's actually yours to control comes down to three things, in order.

First, build a process that improves the aim before the bet is placed: real information, managed bias, criteria tied to what the job actually needs. Second, structure the bet so that when you lose, you lose cheap, tilted toward passing on someone good rather than absorbing the cost of a bad hire in a role that matters. Third, when you lose anyway, and eventually you will, audit the process honestly, and if it holds up, trust it enough to stay put and draw the bow again.

Back to the Stoics to close. The archer who keeps missing adjusts her form, not the wind. Philosophically, that's a hard thing to accept: how the arrow lands was never really ours to control, and it never will be. Our part, in hiring and in most of life, is to keep getting better at aiming, as well as the universe allows. It's a humbling thing to accept that a well-aimed arrow, or a well-informed bet, can still miss, and to have the discipline to keep shooting the same way when it does.