Hiring for the Role You Need Next Quarter Guarantees You Lose the Person This Quarter#39
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… Lose the Person This Quarter
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📝 Blog Draft — Wild Card
Hook: Small platform companies keep losing their best internal candidates by hiring for the future org chart instead of the current one, then wondering why the person who held everything together stops trying.
Angle: When a growing platform company has an internal operator who has been holding the engineering org together informally, the instinct is to hire above them for the role the company needs in 18 months. This creates a predictable failure: the internal person feels passed over, the external hire lacks the context to be effective quickly, and the org ends up with neither the stability it had nor the leadership it wanted. The better move is to formalize what the internal person already does, give them a clear growth path, and hire the complementary skill set alongside them rather than above them.
Source material: Personal/Career/Archive/SkuNexus/transcripts/plaud-2026-04-13 (Doug/Yitz call, creating a path for Jacob, avoiding making him feel blocked, splitting product vs execution), Personal/Career/Archive/SkuNexus/transcripts/plaud-2026-04-17 (hiring decision, Yitz chose Jacob, investors advised fixing engineering first), Personal/Career/Archive/SkuNexus/Director-of-Engineering-Jacob.md (role definition drafted by Doug for Jakob, 'this is an elevation of what he already does'), Personal/Career/Archive/SkuNexus/Post-Game-Analysis-Yitz-Call-2026-03-26 (team dynamics, Jacob as glue, Ian and Luke needing guidance), bai/transcripts/plaud-2026-03-26 (talent management, technical leadership structure, career architecture)
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dotcom/content/blog/2026-05-18-hiring-for-next-quarter-lose-person-this-quarter.md. Edit directly on this branch or merge as-is.To publish: merge this PR. The
blog-publishworkflow will auto-generate a LinkedIn post and cross-post it.To discard: close without merging.