How to keep hiring good people for the roles you hire most

Updated October 2026.

As a business grows, most of its hiring goes into three or four roles, usually in sales and in the team that delivers the work. To keep hiring good people for those roles:

• build a data-driven profile of what your top performers have in common,
• run every candidate through the same process against that profile,
• write down why you chose each person,
• compare each group of hires on retention, time to productivity and performance.

If those numbers improve from one group to the next, your hiring is getting better. If they don’t, it isn’t.

Why does hiring quality drop as a business scales?

Because the roles you need most are the ones you hire under the most pressure, most often, by the most different people.

Hiring in a growing business isn’t spread evenly. Carta’s data shows that in the first half of 2025, about 29.7% of new startup hires were in engineering and another 16.6% in sales, nearly half of all hiring in two functions. In a services business the pattern is the same, with consultants, advisers or account managers in place of engineers. Finance, HR and IT come later, to support the roles that drive growth.

Those core roles also turn over, so you’re refilling seats as well as adding them. In sales, SPOTIO’s 2026 survey found 41% of field sales teams lose half or more of their reps each year. The Bridge Group’s 2026 research found new account executives take 6.2 months to become fully productive, and only 48% hit their annual target.

Put that together and the arithmetic gets heavy fast. A sales team of ten that loses three people a year, and plans to grow by five, has to hire eight salespeople that year just to hit its plan. Each one who doesn’t work out costs six months of ramp, and a seat refilled again.

Under that load, quality usually slips in predictable ways:

• each new hiring manager interviews differently,
• the bar quietly drops when the plan is behind,
• the role is redefined from memory every time it opens,
• nobody compares this year’s hires with last year’s.

Are you short of people, or short of good ones?

Usually short of good ones. Most growing businesses describe the problem as “we can’t find enough people,” but in Australia in 2026 the applications are there. SEEK has reported applications per job ad at record highs this year.

What’s scarce is the ability to find, choose and keep the right people consistently, the tenth time as well as the first. That’s a different problem, and it has different fixes.

For some roles the shortage is real. In accounting, the 2026 Accounting Talent Index found 73% of firms are turning away new work and 71% have had growth slowed by staffing. But even there, the firms that grow are the ones that hire well repeatedly, not just quickly.

Which roles should you focus on first?

The three or four you hire most often, and that most directly limit growth. That’s usually salespeople and the people who deliver the work.

A quick way to find them: list every hire from the last two years and the next twelve months of plans. The roles that appear five or more times are your repeat roles. Getting those right is worth more than perfecting every one-off hire.

How do you find out what your top performers have in common?

Use a structured, data-driven method rather than gut feel. That means:

• measuring your best people with the same validated assessment you’ll use on candidates,
• comparing them with average performers,
• checking the result against real performance data.

The output is a profile for the role: a range on each trait that matters, built from your own people.

1. Choose the comparison group on evidence. Pick your top performers in the role using hard data: results against target, how long they’ve stayed, time to full productivity and their manager’s rating. Then include solid average performers and, if you have them, people who didn’t work out. Specialist providers build these profiles from high, average and lower performers together, because a trait everyone shares can’t explain why some people outperform. One established methodology recommends a sample of around 30, split fairly evenly across the three groups.

2. Measure everyone with the same validated assessment. Your current people complete exactly what candidates will complete. Good workplace assessments measure how someone works and what drives them, the things a CV and a conversation miss, in a consistent way you can compare across people.

3. Add structured input from the people who know the job. Instead of open conversations, managers and top performers rate what the role actually demands using a structured job analysis questionnaire. Some providers recommend at least five people complete it, so the picture isn’t one manager’s opinion.

4. Build the profile as ranges, not an ideal person. Combine the assessment results with the performance data and the job analysis. Keep only the traits that separate your top performers from the rest, and express each as a target range.

5. Treat it as a starting point. With a small team, a profile is a working hypothesis. Test it against your next hires, as set out below, and adjust the ranges as the evidence builds.

Who can do this for you?

There are three main routes:

• Assessment platforms you run yourself. Providers such as Prevue, PeopleKeys, TalentClick and Criteria offer workplace assessments, and several build benchmarks from your top performers. Prevue, for example, combines a top performer study with a job description survey from hiring managers, and compares candidates against the result. This suits businesses with someone in-house who can run and interpret it.
• Specialist consultancies. Firms with organisational psychologists run benchmark studies as a project, then hand the profile to your team to use.
• A hiring partner that builds it into the whole process. This is what we do at Ploomo. The profile sets the target for every search, and it updates as each group of hires is tracked.

What to look for in any provider

• Evidence it predicts performance. Ask for validation data showing the assessment predicts results in roles like yours, not just that it describes personality. As Wharton’s Peter Cappelli has argued, if a vendor can’t show it predicts who will be good at the job, don’t rely on it.
• The same tool for your people and your candidates. Otherwise you’re comparing two different things.
• Ranges, not a single number. A person shouldn’t be reduced to a grade. Look for results shown against a target range, with room for judgment.
• Job-related and fair. It should measure what drives performance in the role, not similarity to your current team. Hiring for sameness narrows your pool and can build in bias.
• A reasonable candidate experience. Strong candidates have options. Long or repetitive assessments lose them.

How do you hire the same role well, again and again?

Treat each repeat role as something to get better at, not a vacancy to fill.

1. Use the profile for every search. Reuse it each time the role opens, rather than redefining the role from memory.

2. Run every candidate through the same process. The same stages, assessment and interview questions, judged against the profile. That’s what makes candidates comparable, and it stops each manager hiring by their own instinct.

3. Set one bar, and protect it when the plan is behind. The pressure to fill a seat is highest when you’re short, which is exactly when a wrong hire costs most. Agree in advance what “good enough” means.

4. Write down why you chose each person. Two sentences: why this candidate, and why not the next best. It takes minutes and it’s the only way to learn from the outcome later.

5. Keep the pipeline warm. Repeat roles open again and again, so keep talking to good people between openings. Starting each search from zero is how the bar ends up dropping.

6. Make the first weeks consistent too. A good hire with a poor start can look like a bad hire. The same onboarding for every person in the role keeps the comparison fair.

How do you know if your hiring is getting better?

Compare groups of hires in the same role. This is the one place hiring improvement can actually be measured, because you’re making the same decision many times.

For each repeat role, track every hire on three things:

Then compare this year’s hires with last year’s. If more are staying, ramping faster and performing, your hiring is getting better.

One caution: retention and performance also depend on management, onboarding and pay. Comparing groups of hires in the same role, under the same manager, is the fairest way to see what hiring itself is changing.

What does this look like in practice?

This is how we run it for repeat roles:

• Before the search opens, the client’s top performers complete the same assessments every candidate will, and we build the profile for the role from them.
• Every applicant is assessed early, straight after their CV is reviewed, so the first shortlist is already compared with how your best people work.
• The first candidates come forward early, and the hiring manager compares them side by side. Where their judgment differs from the profile, the profile changes.
• Every hire is tracked on retention, time to productivity and performance, so the profile gets sharper with each group of hires.

What if you’re hiring faster than you can do this yourself?

Then it’s worth deciding how to resource it. There are three broad options:

• pay per hire through agencies,
• build your own hiring team,
• get access to a hiring function run for you.

Our guides to building an in-house hiring function and what recruitment agency fees actually buy set out what each costs and when it makes sense.

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Hiring for a role now? Tell us about it, and we’ll tell you what the market looks like for it and when you could expect a shortlist, before you commit to anything.

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Josh del Rio is the founder and CEO of Ploomo, which runs hiring for growing businesses so every role is built on evidence, not instinct. He has coached hundreds of leaders and founders.