Three Signs It Was the Conditions, Not the Candidate
There’s a sentence I hear most weeks from SaaS and tech founders whose first marketing hire didn’t work out.
“They just weren’t the right fit.”
Sometimes it’s true. But sometimes marketing is four or five distinct careers wearing the same job title, and it’s genuinely possible to hire a brilliant brand marketer when what you needed was someone who could drive demand.
But most of the time, “wrong fit” is simply the easiest available explanation for something that took nine months to go wrong.
The biggest problem about this explanation?
You can’t check it.
The person has left, and you don’t really want to ask them about their version of events. So “wrong fit” sits there, untested and untestable, and it feels like an answer. Three months later you’re back on the recruitment sites with a slightly sharper spec and a slightly higher salary, looking for the same role with a better candidate in it.
That’s the expensive part that’s easy to miss. Not the first hire. The second one, made on the strength of a conclusion nobody ever checked.
Why the wrong diagnosis costs more than the hire did
Around 80% of first marketing hires fail within twelve months. Between recruitment, salary, onboarding and the momentum you don’t get back, the cost typically lands somewhere between £40,000 and £150,000, depending on the size of the business and how long it took to admit it wasn’t working.
The number that gets overlooked is what happens next.
A founder who concludes “I picked wrong” has nothing to change. There’s no action needed. So they repeat the process with more caution and less conviction, and the next person walks into the exact same room as the first.
A founder who concludes “the conditions weren’t there” has three or four things to fix, which only take weeks to resolve rather than months and, potentially, another bad experience.
Same event. Two completely different futures. The only variable is the accuracy of the diagnosis.
So here’s how I’d test it.
Three things you can check on your own, this afternoon, without needing anyone else’s account of what happened.
1. The elusive business plan
Not the pitch deck. Not the last board update. Not the revenue target.
The document that tells those who need to know where the business is going over the next 12 months, what marketing needs to drive it, and what a good lead actually looks like.
If that existed mainly in conversation or in your head and is only retrievable by asking you, then your marketer’s genuine first job was extracting that information from you. That is real work. It takes months, and it requires face time that busy founders rarely have to give. It’s fundamentally a different job from the one on the spec.
It also wasn’t what you reviewed them against.
The test. Ask yourself what you could have emailed them on day one. If the honest answer is a who’s-who spreadsheet and a growth target, then what you provided was orientation, not onboarding. Onboarding is induction into a system. There wasn’t a system yet.
What to do about it. You don’t need a 50-page business plan. All you need is a simple one-page document informing: where the business is heading, what marketing owns within that, what a qualified lead is, and what would count as success at ninety days.
If you can’t produce that page yourself, that’s not an argument for hiring someone to write it; it’s the thing to resolve before hiring anyone else to deliver against it.
2. The job ad and your review notes describe two different jobs
This one takes about two minutes, and almost nobody does it.
Find the job ad you ran.
Find the notes from the performance conversation.
Put them side by side.
Now circle everything you assessed them on that either isn’t in the ad at all or appears in it under “Preferred” or “Nice to Have”.
An internal way of working.
A methodology the rest of the team has in their bones.
A process everybody else absorbed by osmosis over three years.
A tool.
A framework…
You get where I’m going here.
Whatever you circle is your unwritten job description.
It’s usually where the gap was, and nobody agreed to it, because nobody wrote it down. It also means the person was measured against a standard they had no way of knowing existed, and no way of meeting even if they had.
I’ll be straightforward about this one: it’s the one I’ve been on the receiving end of. Assessed against a working methodology I’d never been trained in, which appeared in the job description as a nice-to-have. I scored myself honestly and low against it. That honesty then became part of the evidence. It’s why I look for this first.
The test. Count the circled items. One is a conversation you should have had earlier. Three or more is a brief problem.
What to do about it. Before the next hire, write down every expectation you have that isn’t in the ad, including the ones that feel too obvious to say. Then decide which are;
Genuinely required,
Trainable, and who is responsible for the training.
That list is often more useful than the job description itself.
3. They got more cautious over time, not less
Good marketers in the right environment get bolder the more comfortable they are there. Not less.
This is the one founders can see clearly in hindsight, and rarely come to the right conclusion while it’s happening.
A capable person, hired for their judgement, gradually stops using it.
You hear fewer unprompted ideas
They start asking permission for decisions they used to make.
They start delivering exactly what was asked for, on time, and nothing beyond it.
From the outside, that looks like disengagement, or a motivation problem, or someone who’s mentally checked out.
More often than we’d like to admit, they’ve adapted. It’s what a person does after learning that initiative gets overruled or cancelled. They realise the safest available move is to wait to be told.
Once a marketer has had a plan stopped without a conversation about why, the rational response is to stop proposing plans.
The tragedy of it is that the resulting caution then reads as proof they weren’t up to the job.
The test. Compare month one to month five. Were they bringing you more or fewer ideas or possibilities? Experienced people don’t become timid on a whim. Something taught them to be, and it’s worth knowing what.
What to do about it. Decision rights. A written list of what this role decides alone, what it decides with you, and what comes to you.
Most founders have never articulated this, because when you’re doing marketing yourself, the answer is always “me.” The moment someone else holds the function, ambiguity comes in, and it’s the single fastest way to neutralise a good hire.
Two more, if you want to go further
Nothing in the business changed after they left.
If the only things you altered were the job description and the salary band, then you’ve treated it as a recruitment problem.
Ask how the environment and conditions have changed since the last hire. If the answer is that they haven’t, the next hire is walking into the same conditions with a better CV.
Work that was visible for weeks only became wrong once somebody finally looked properly.
If a plan ran for a month, was presented, discussed, signed off in passing, and then was stopped as fundamentally misdirected, that’s not a judgement failure on the marketer’s side. That’s a review problem wearing a judgement problem’s clothes.
Short, regular, structured check-ins would have surfaced the disagreement in week one, when it cost nothing.
What about the marketer's part in it?
They almost always have one. Mine included.
The most common version is a marketer who saw the problem early, decided to raise it “once I’ve got my feet under the desk,” and never quite did.
New people don’t want to arrive complaining. So they absorb ambiguity, work around missing processes, dive into the information they can get their hands on, and hope clarity arrives later. It rarely does, and by the time it’s urgent enough to raise, the relationship between them and the founder is already strained.
I’m not offering that as balance for its own sake. It matters because it tells you something practical: a first marketing hire needs explicit, early, structured permission to tell you what isn’t working. Without it, you’ll find out at the exit interview.
The useful question after a failed hire was never “who got this wrong.” It’s “what conditions produced this outcome?” Because conditions are the only part of it you can change.
What this actually means for you
Here’s the part that gets missed in all the writing about failed marketing hires, including a lot of mine.
If your last hire failed for conditions reasons, that’s GOOD NEWS.
Conditions are fixable. Most of what’s described above takes weeks, not months, to fix, and none of it requires a bigger budget or a more senior candidate. Simply;
A one-page business plan.
A written brief that matches what you’ll actually assess.
A list of decision rights.
Regular reviews that catch disagreement early.
A business with those four things in place doesn’t merely avoid another failed hire. It gets substantially more out of the hire it makes.
Same salary, same person, better return, and usually faster, because the marketer spends month one doing marketing rather than trying to understand and navigate processes or find information, etc.
That’s the version I want a founder to take away. Not that hiring is dangerous, or that you should wait until some mythical stage of maturity before bringing marketing in-house. Preparation doesn’t slow hiring down. It’s what makes the hire work.
The growth you were reaching for when you made that first hire is usually closer than you think.
And it was never sitting in a better CV.
Do You Know Where Your Business Stands?
If you’d like to check where your business actually stands before you hire again, the free Marketing Readiness Assessment scores you across the five areas that decide whether a marketing hire succeeds.