Why CEOs Avoid It, Delegate It, or Get It Wrong — and What Actually Works
When it comes to hiring, most CEOs of fast-growing small organizations fall into one of two camps.
Hire aggressively without understanding downstream impact
Wait so long that the team is bleeding and panic hires follow.
Rare do I ever find a CEO who wants to sit down with the Talent team and strategically think about hiring. If the CEO agrees there needs to be a strategy, then it is a task that is handed to the Finance team to “work” with HR to crunch the numbers. When workforce strategy becomes a Finance and HR exercise, it turns into a cost-control problem instead of a growth strategy.
A workforce strategy is about the numbers but not in the way finance will typically look at it. This strategy must be tied to the sales goals, product roadmap, your current talent’s abilities, your “if / then” budgets, and of course the actual business strategy. It isn’t about giving a chunk of the budget to each department and letting them figure it out. What is funny is that most strong managers know how to do this but put it at the bottom of their priorities.
Strategic Thinking
What I see most often isn’t a lack of strategic thinking; it’s the difficulty of prioritizing it.
When the market feels volatile or uncertain, long-range planning is usually the first thing to get pushed aside. Not because it isn’t important, but because the payoff is delayed. Answering emails, solving today’s problems, or building a clean spreadsheet feels more productive in the moment.
In practice, the teams that navigate this best still work from a flexible plan. They outline what they’re trying to achieve for the year and build in options to adjust as conditions change. That includes a realistic view of their workforce; who they already have, what gaps exist, and what it actually costs to add capacity. Hiring costs aren’t just salaries; they include recruiting time, onboarding, ramp-up, and benefits. Those details tend to matter most when decisions get hard.
Current Assets
Before any hiring action takes place, it is worth assessing the current team and look for skill gaps and turnover that will be needed in the year to come. Are there people who are on their way out? Are there employees who with some training could meet the needs of the company this year? Or do you truly not have enough employees to meet the upcoming demands of this year’s sales goals? Do you really need 3 people running accounts payable?
I’ve seen this play out in a lot of growing organizations. A department head flags that they’re overloaded and asks for more support. There’s no real breakdown of how time is currently spent, but the roles seem inexpensive and the work is unfamiliar to leadership, so the request gets approved.
A few months later, other teams start asking why that group has so much headcount, and why they’re still not getting the support they expected. What started as a reasonable decision quietly turns into confusion, friction, and internal tension.
In a few organizations I’ve worked with I’ve seen managers hire before looking at their existing team. A strong employee takes on more responsibility, stretches into new work, and figures out how to make it run. Instead of developing that person, the manager hires a specialist for the new tasks.
The alternative is often less expensive and more effective: invest in training the existing employee for the specialist role and backfill their original position. You preserve momentum, reduce ramp time, and keep someone with deep institutional knowledge in the work instead of starting from scratch.
ROI
ROI isn’t about justifying headcount after the fact. It’s about deciding whether a role should exist at all.
Every employee and every hire should have an ROI. It doesn’t matter if the role is supporting or producing. The challenge is how you assess and attach that ROI to each employee. Naturally, the sales department is easy; give everyone a 1 million dollar goal and you’re done. Right? However, what about the sales ops team? Or customer service/tech support? What is the time these departments devote to the sales team to ensure they meet their million dollar goals?
When reviewing your product roadmap, what is the revenue value for each launch? What will happen if your teams miss the deadlines? How much revenue could be lost? Do you need to hire people for the product launches? How many people will be involved in the hiring and onboarding/training process? What is the cost savings or loss for recruiting and training in-house vs outsourcing?
No matter how many employees complain that “everything is siloed”, no company truly works without inter-departmental dependencies. When you see an increase in sales, you’ll also experience an increase in Support calls, and more demands on sales ops. You’ll also find more product requests and bugs to fix. Those “supporting roles” have a ROI it is just harder to calculate. When output and goals are not defined, hiring hemorrhages money.
Hiring without Productivity is Guessing
Hiring without a clear definition of output and goals is guessing. The role may feel necessary, the team may be busy, and the work may be real, but without agreed-upon outcomes, there’s no way to assess whether the cost is justified.
Cost alone doesn’t tell you if a role is valuable. A low-salary hire can create more drag than a higher-cost one if the work is unclear or redundant. And while “busy” is often used as a signal to hire, it’s not a metric. It’s usually a symptom of unclear priorities, process gaps, or misaligned roles.
The question isn’t whether the work needs to be done. It’s whether adding headcount is the most effective way to get the outcome the business actually needs.
Designing a Workforce Strategy
Sitting down with department heads and HR to discuss an honest strategy based on the company goals sounds like another painful unnecessary HR exercise. However, it isn’t as complex as many think, especially with a smaller organization even if you plan for exponential growth. An ounce of prevention can save you millions.
Roire Sales Plug
Most companies don’t overspend on people because they’re reckless.
They overspend because no one helps leadership decide when to hire, when to wait, and when to redesign the work.
If you want to build a workforce strategy tied to growth, not just headcount, Roire HR can help.
