Few decisions cost an agency more than getting the wrong person into the wrong seat. A bad hire drains months of salary, onboarding, and momentum. Every bad hire typically looks great on paper. The résumé fit, the interview clicked, everyone in the room nodded… and three months later, you're fixing their work and wondering where it went wrong. 

That's the trap with hiring: it's a bet placed in a single high-stakes moment, and the cost of getting it wrong shows up long after the hire. This post is about making that bet deliberately: the right person, for this exact role, for the right reasons.

First, Ask One Question: IC or Manager?

Before you write a single line of a job post, answer this: are you hiring for an individual contributor role or a managerial one? Because what you're actually screening for changes completely depending on the answer.

If you're hiring an IC, hire for skill.

An IC lives or dies by their craft. Can they do the work at the level you need, without someone holding their hand? That's the job. Culture and personality still matter - we'll get to that soon - but the non-negotiable for an IC is competence in the actual role.

And here's the trap agencies fall into: hire for the skills someone has right now, not the skills you assume will "transfer," and not the person you imagine they'll grow into six months from now. It's easy to talk yourself into a candidate. They're sharp, they'll pick it up, that adjacent experience is basically the same thing. Sometimes it is. Often it isn't, and you end up paying for the gap. You're hiring a person to do a job, not a potential that you're hoping materializes.

That doesn't mean you can never bet on someone. Plenty of agencies have taken a promising person with most of the skills and trained them into a great one, and it has paid off. But be honest with yourself about what that is: a bet. If you're going to hire for potential over present skill, go in eyes open, knowing it may mean months of ramp-up with no guarantee at the end.

And here's the upside that makes the bet worth it: the agencies willing to invest in people this way often earn something you can't hire for… loyalty. When you take a chance on someone and help them grow into the role, they tend to remember it. People rarely forget the team that believed in them before they'd proven themselves, and that kind of investment has a way of paying you back in employees who stay and who give back what was given to them. So if you have the time, the mentorship, and the appetite for the risk, it can absolutely be worth it. Just don't make that bet by accident, thinking you're hiring someone who can already do the job.

So when you're hiring an IC, optimize for the skill. That's what the role needs.

If you're hiring a manager, hire for the character.

Flip it for leadership roles. A manager's job isn't to be the most technically brilliant person in the room; it's to grow people, set direction, navigate conflict, and protect the team. So when you hire a manager, weigh culture alignment, values, and personality above raw technical skill. And the fact that someone was a brilliant IC doesn’t mean they’ll be a brilliant manager.

Because here's the part agencies forget: being great at the work is not the same as being great at leading the work. There's well-known research on this: economists studied sales teams and found that the best salespeople were the most likely to get promoted into management… and then became the worst managers, with their teams' performance actually declining afterward.

That’s because the skills that make someone a phenomenal IC (deep focus, individual output, mastery of a craft) are not the skills that make someone a good manager (developing others, delegating, thinking in systems). One job is about being the best at the work. The other is about making everyone else better at it. Promoting someone across that line without preparing them for the mindset shift is setting them up to struggle.

If you had to rank what matters for a managerial hire, it looks roughly like this: personality and values first, skill second. The reverse of how you'd hire an IC.

It goes without saying that the dream hire has both elite craft and the human side. And when someone has both, your life gets dramatically easier, because that's the person you can eventually promote without rolling the dice. 

But you won't always get both, especially when there's an urgent need and a seat you have to fill now. When you're forced to choose, choose differently depending on the seat: skill for ICs, character for managers.

So far, we've talked about the trap of promoting your best IC just because they're great at the craft. But let's say you've got the rarer, better situation: someone who's genuinely excellent at the work and shows real signs of the human side: the judgment, the way people gravitate to them, the instinct to make others better. Well, that's its own beast, and it deserves its own post where we cover exactly how to make that call on promoting your IC into a manager.

Hiring is a Bet - Place It on Purpose

Hiring well isn't about finding one mythical person who's brilliant at everything. It's about knowing which bet you're placing: skill for the people who do the work, character for the people who lead it. Get that distinction right, and you start building strong teams over time.

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