Delegate Hiring at Your Peril

In the end, the people you hire will work for you (not the recruiting team), so you have to own it like it’s your job (because it is).

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about for a long time:

Hiring is the single highest-leverage activity in your business. It’s the thing that changes everything: Your culture, your output, your stress levels, and your ability to sleep at night.

And yet, it consistently gets the least amount of attention from the people who should care most.

Why?

I think the problem starts when companies grow.

In the early days, founders get it. They’re in the room for every interview. They feel the weight of every hire. They know in their bones that one wrong person can derail a team, tank morale, or burn months of runway.

But then something shifts.

The company scales. There’s a recruiting team now. There are “processes.” And slowly, almost invisibly, the founder steps back. They delegate. They assume it’s handled.

And that’s where it starts to fall apart.

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The Handoff Problem

Delegation without teaching is just abandonment.

If you’re a founder or executive who has stepped away from hiring, ask yourself if you shared anything about hiring with your team? Did you transfer the instincts, the judgment, the ability to spot a great candidate and sell them on the vision?

Or did you just… stop showing up?

Because hiring isn’t a task you check off. It’s a discipline. A craft. And if leadership doesn’t model it, teach it, and reinforce it, it degrades fast.

I’ve seen it happen over and over again. A company that made incredible early hires suddenly starts misfiring. The bar drops. The culture gets murky. And everyone wonders what went wrong.

What went wrong is that the people making hiring decisions were never taught how to make them.

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Culture Is the Through-Line

There’s another layer here too: values.

If your company doesn’t have clearly defined values, or worse, has them written on a wall somewhere but no one can actually speak to them, how do you expect your hiring managers to attract the right people?

Candidates are evaluating you as much as you’re evaluating them. And if your interviewers can’t articulate what you stand for, what the culture feels like, what success looks like here, you’re going to lose the best ones. And hire the wrong ones.

Hiring isn’t just about skills and experience. It’s about fit. And fit requires clarity.

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Own It Like It’s the Most Important Part of Your Job

Because it is.

I don’t care how big your company gets or how great your recruiting team is: The people you hire are going to work for you. They’re going to be in your meetings, on your projects, shaping your outcomes.

The recruiter isn’t going to manage them. You are.

So why would you treat the decision like it’s someone else’s responsibility?

Great companies treat hiring as a leadership function, not an HR function. They build systems, but they never fully let go. The best founders I know are still in final rounds. Still teaching their managers how to interview. Still reinforcing what “great” looks like.

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If you do nothing else in 2026, hire better.

Not “technically better.” Not “faster.” Better.

Be in the room. Teach the people around you. Define your culture so clearly that anyone on your team can speak to it.

Delegate hiring at your peril. Because in the end, those people don’t work for recruiting.

They work for you.

This post was inspired by a conversation on the Hiring Room podcast. You can listen to the full episode here when it’s released.