The myth of “no surprises” hiring and the quiet damage it does to your team

“You can be rigorous and humble at the same time. In fact, you must be.”
— Jim Collins, Good to Great

A few years ago, we placed a candidate with a client. They were competent, grounded, and composed during interviews. The background check was clean. The references were strong.

But just weeks into the job, something shifted. The candidate made comments indicating serious emotional distress, specifically, hints of suicidal ideation. The team was rattled. Leadership was stunned. And we were looped into an emergency situation none of us saw coming.

One of the client’s first reactions was, “Why didn’t anyone catch this?”
It’s a fair emotional response, but it reveals an unfair assumption.

Here’s the truth:
This was the first time we had ever encountered something like this in our entire recruiting history.
And now, years later, it still hasn’t happened again.

It was rare. Extreme. Unpredictable.

No behavioral question. No resume. No reference call. Not even the hiring manager’s in-house interviews, done independently of ours, raised red flags.

You Can Build a Strong Process. But You Can’t Make It Psychic.

This wasn’t a missed step.
It wasn’t a failure of diligence.
It was a reminder: there is a level of wildness to human behavior that no process can fully contain.

Hiring professionals and company leaders should pursue rigor in their assessments. We certainly do. But it’s essential to understand the limits of even the best systems.

Expecting recruiters or HR to reliably surface one-in-a-decade crises doesn’t make your process stronger. It just creates anxiety and blame for your internal team, who are often doing everything right.

We hadn’t seen that situation before and we haven’t seen it since. You know what we have seen a lot of? Weird unpredictable situations.

Now we still helped this client and made them whole from their investment, but it still sucked time and attention from everyone. Not an ideal outcome.

The Quiet Damage of Unrealistic Expectations

We’ve seen it too many times:

• HR professionals walking on eggshells, terrified of missing something unmissable
• Recruiters pulled into post-hire panic as scapegoats
• Leaders disillusioned by a hiring process that “should have” prevented all surprise

But people are not spreadsheets.
And hiring is not procurement.
It’s the beginning of a working relationship with a whole human being.

Amateur leaders want certainty (and usually really fast)
Mature leaders build for discovery

Mastery Is Built on Rigor and Grace

Let’s be clear: structured interviews matter.
So do reference calls, personality assessments, and cultural due diligence.
We build those things into every search we lead.

But maturity in hiring means knowing what those tools can do—and what they can’t.

They can reduce risk. They can surface patterns. They can equip leaders to make wise decisions.

What they can’t do is see the future.

That means the question isn’t “Why didn’t we know?”
It’s “What do we know now, and how will we respond with clarity and care?”

The best hiring cultures don’t expect perfection.
They expect to grow through every hire.

P.S. It drives me crazy when recruiting firms pretend like every hire works perfectly and 100% of their candidates are Nobel laureates who’ve solved world peace and not changed jobs since the recruiter “placed” them. Give us a break. Tell us you don’t understand recruiting without telling us you don’t understand recruiting. Lies that perpetuate this myth that only recruiters can find perfect candidates, tarnishing the industry.

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