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School of HiringAuthor: School of Hiring
Do you find hiring frustrating?? Are you disappointed with recruiting?? My name is Konstanty Sliwowski and I am a veteran of nearly 20 years in the business of recruitment, strategic talent acquisition and employment consultancy. I now focus my time on advising organisations and managers on how to be more, strategic, efficient, and effective at engaging and hiring top talent.In this podcast series, I speak with business leaders about how they attract and hire top performers. The high's and low's. And of course some funny stories and recruitment mishaps.If you are tired of recruitment processes that suck up your time and seem to never end and are looking for a more predictable way to attract, engage and hire top talent but also reduce the number of candidates you need to interview, come listen to our guest hiring managers including CEO's, CTO's, and CPO's open up about hiring experiences and how they approach talent acquisition. Language: en-gb Genres: Business, Careers, Management Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it Trailer: |
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The Real Reason Great Hires Still Fail (with Ashley Herd)
Friday, 27 March, 2026
Send us Fan MailMost hiring failures do not start in the interview.They start much earlier, when the role is poorly defined, success is unclear, candidates are not given the right context, and managers inherit a process that was never built to set anyone up to succeed.In this episode, I sit down with Ashley Herd, former employment lawyer, HR executive at McKinsey and Yum Brands, and author of The Manager Method, to break down where hiring really goes wrong and what leaders need to fix before they open their next search.We get into why most job descriptions fail to define success, how bad hiring decisions are often design failures rather than selection failures, and why the candidate experience so often promises one environment while the job delivers another. Ashley also shares her “tight jeans vs oversized sweatpants” framework for management, and we unpack what structured autonomy actually looks like in practice.We also go deep on onboarding, executive failure, the role HR should play versus the role it often gets left with, and the question more leaders need to ask now: should this role even exist in the form we are hiring for?If you hire, lead, or build teams, this conversation will change how you think about role design, interviewing, onboarding, and management. In this episode, Ashley Herd joins me to unpack why so many hiring decisions go wrong long before a candidate enters the process.We explore the real root of hiring failure: poorly defined roles, vague success criteria, copy-paste job descriptions, and interview processes that generate very little signal. Ashley explains why most organisations are still hiring for tasks and years of experience instead of outcomes, future context, and the behaviours that actually drive success. We also get into one of the most useful frameworks from the conversation: tight jeans vs oversized sweatpants management. Tight jeans managers over-control. Oversized sweatpants managers create ambiguity. The goal is somewhere in the middle: structured autonomy. We cover:Why most hiring failures are really role-design failuresWhat job descriptions miss when they describe activity instead of successWhy unstructured interviews produce weak hiring decisionsHow candidates are often sold one environment and dropped into anotherWhy hiring should be treated as the first phase of onboardingWhy executive hires fail faster and more often than most leaders realiseHow to think about AI when redefining roles and headcountWhy hiring works best as a partnership between HR and the businessKey ideas from the episodeMost jobs are defined too loosely to hire well againstSuccess should be defined at 90 days, 6 months, and beyondThe interview process should reflect the real working environmentManagers need guidance, not just responsibilityIf you do not define the role properly up front, the failure cascades laterFollow Ashley Herd: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleyherdGet The Manager Method: https://www.managermethod.com/book Follow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and newsletter.schoolofhiring.com
