Why Should You Never Hire Out of Desperation?

You should never hire out of desperation because desperation quietly changes the question you are answering — you stop asking “is this the right person?” and start asking “can this person start Monday?” I’m Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and since March 2020 my team has built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US. I watched one business owner spend $60,000 over six months on a hire with 17 years of experience on the resume who brought in exactly zero dollars. That one hire nearly took the whole business down. It was not a talent problem. It was a desperation problem, and it started long before anyone sat down for an interview.

What does a desperation hire actually cost?

A desperation hire costs you the salary, the time, and your position in the market all at once, which is why the number on the payroll line is always the smallest part of it. In the case I just described, the salary was $60,000 over six months. But that seat was supposed to be producing. For half a year it produced nothing, while the owner kept paying for it, kept managing it, and kept telling himself it would turn around next month. Meanwhile the work that role existed to do simply did not happen. I have written before about where the true cost of a bad hire comes from, and the pattern is consistent: the direct cost is visible and the indirect cost is three or four times larger.

Why doesn’t experience on a resume predict results?

Experience on a resume tells you how long someone held a title, not what they produced while they held it. Seventeen years in a role and seventeen years of results are two completely different claims, and a resume only makes the first one. This is the trap desperation walks straight into, because when you are under pressure a long resume feels like safety. It reads like proof that someone else already took the risk for you. It is not. The only thing that predicts what someone will do in your business is evidence of what they actually delivered somewhere else — numbers, outcomes, situations they owned — and the behaviour they show you when you ask them to talk through a failure.

How do you know if you are hiring out of desperation?

You are hiring out of desperation when the reason you want to say yes is the calendar rather than the candidate. It is easy to spot once you know the signal. You feel relief when someone half-decent applies. You quietly shorten the process because you do not want to lose them. You catch yourself using the phrase “good enough for now.” You skip the reference calls because they will only slow things down. And the clearest tell of all: you spend more of the interview selling the role than assessing the person. If your standards move because the seat has been open eight weeks, they were never standards — they were preferences. I have written a whole post on whether your hiring standards are too low, and desperation is the single most common reason they slip.

What actually causes desperation hiring?

Desperation hiring is caused by starting the search too late, not by a bad candidate pool. Almost every rushed hire I have seen traces back to the same sequence: somebody resigns, the notice period burns down, the work piles onto whoever is left, and by week six the owner will take anyone with a pulse and a relevant job title. Nothing about that is a market problem. It is a timing problem. Before we changed how we run searches, average time-to-fill in the industries we serve sat around 68 days. We cut that to 37 by doing the definition work — who this person is, what they own, who signs off — before the job was ever posted, not after the applications started arriving.

How do you protect the decision when the seat is already empty?

Separate the emergency from the decision: cover the work one way, and hire with full rigour the other way. These are two different problems and desperation is what happens when you try to solve them with a single signature. The coverage problem has several honest answers — a contractor, a temporary or contract placement, overtime for the team, redistributing the critical tasks, or pausing lower-priority work for a month. None of them are permanent and none of them need to be. They buy you the one thing desperation strips away, which is the ability to say no. If the pressure is real and you need help holding the line, that is exactly the situation our team at CPG Recruitment is built for.

What does a proper process do that a desperate one skips?

A proper process decides who you are looking for before it meets a single person, so the candidate is measured against a written standard instead of against your current stress level. That means an Ideal Candidate Profile, agreement from everyone who holds a yes or a no, one consistent interview run against that profile, and real reference work rather than the curated list the candidate hands you. I have broken this down into the three steps to hire the right person, and every one of them is a step desperation deletes first. The references are worth singling out, because they are the step people cut when they are in a hurry — and the references a candidate gives you are exactly the ones least likely to tell you anything useful.

Is it ever better to leave the seat empty?

Yes, and more often than most owners want to hear. An empty seat costs you output. That is a real cost, but it is a known one, it is contained, and it stops the day you fill the role properly. The wrong person costs you output plus salary plus management attention plus the effect on the people around them plus, frequently, a client relationship you spent years building. An empty seat is a gap. A bad hire is a hole that keeps getting deeper, and it is far harder to reverse than it was to create. When I am asked which risk to take, I take the gap almost every time.

What should you do differently on your next hire?

Start the search before you are in pain, and write down what you are looking for while you are still calm enough to be honest about it. That is the whole lesson from the $60,000 story. The owner did not lack judgement — he had simply run out of runway by the time the decision landed on his desk, and at that point the process was never going to save him. Build the profile early, keep a shortlist warm even when you are not hiring, and treat an open role as a project with a start date rather than an emergency that begins the day someone quits.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long should you leave a role open before lowering your standards?

You do not lower the standard — you widen the search. If eight weeks have passed with nothing worth interviewing, the problem is almost always reach or positioning, not the bar. Change where you are looking, change how the role is described, or bring in help. Dropping the standard is the one change that guarantees you pay for it later.

What should you do if you have already made a desperation hire?

Decide quickly and honestly, usually inside the first 30 to 90 days. Be direct about what is not working, put a specific and measurable expectation in front of them, and give it a defined window. If nothing moves, act. The most expensive version of this mistake is not making it — it is spending six months hoping it resolves itself.

Can a recruitment agency help if you are already desperate?

Yes, and mostly for a reason people do not expect: it gives you back your options. A recruiter running a parallel pipeline means you are choosing between several qualified people instead of deciding whether to settle for one. Options are what desperation removes, and having them is what lets you hold your standard under pressure.

Should you hire someone overqualified just to fill the seat faster?

Only if you can answer honestly why they want the role and what keeps them there in a year. Overqualified hires work when there is a real reason — a move, a shift in priorities, a step they genuinely want. They fail when the only reason is that they needed a job and you needed a body, which is desperation on both sides of the table.

If your seat has been open too long and you can feel your standards starting to slide, that is the moment to bring in help rather than the moment to settle. Book a recruitment consultation with CPG Recruitment and we will run the search properly, or get in touch with me directly if you want to talk it through first. For the company’s take on building a process that keeps desperation out of the room, read how a hiring process prevents a desperation hire.