You are who you hire

You want initiative, innovation, change, risk-taking, decision-making, out-of-the-box thinking.

Your policy document reads like a prison circular, and your hiring process ensures only those who fit in make it through. None of the things you actually want are assessed when you hire. I don't have to tell you what you end up with — you're living with the proof.

Aligning HR operations to strategic intent is the one thing CEOs need to do the hard work on. Get that right and most HR processes start delivering what you expected of them. It sounds more complex than it is. It comes quite naturally once you commit the time and steer the conversation right. Your top job as an organization builder is to define strategic intent, then make sure the people you hire are aligned to it. The tools and the team handle the rest.

And in the AI era this stops being soft talk. When a small, well-structured team can now outrun a large one, who you hire is the whole game. One aligned, self-driven person compounds. One misaligned hire in a key role doesn't just underperform — they slow everyone around them down.

When plugHR runs BHRAF — the Business HR Alignment Framework that distils your business plan into a people operating plan — we spend 90% of our time with CEOs and business owners. BHRAF is as central to plugHR 2.0 as it ever was; it's the work that feeds Workforce Strategy Alignment, the first of our 8 pillars. After it, most teams run 10x faster. The thing we crack is simple: no execution labour gets spent until intent is defined first. I won't board a train, however late it is, unless I know where you want me to go. Sounds obvious, doesn't it?

You'd be surprised how many people in an organization just board the train because of deadlines, then keep switching moving trains across tracks to somehow reach somewhere.

Give us a shout if you want to stop wasting precious human labour and run 10x faster. You do what you do best. Leave HR to plugHR.

Originally published on the plugHR blog.