The Worst Hire I Ever Made
(lessons learned)
By Future of Teams · 4 min read
Let my own personal experience save you from the next bad hire. Although I was relatively new to the company, it was obvious that testing was a clear bottleneck. We had no dedicated testers, no automation, and relied on a single SME who knew the system inside out. So I thought, why not fix all those problems at once with one hire? I decided an AI-driven UI testing platform with promises of self-healing tests, end-to-end automation, and faster releases was my dream hire. The cost was roughly half a full-time salary, so I effectively brought on our first ‘digital hire’. It felt like the perfect hiring decision: a one-time investment that would save time, reduce risk, and free our SME to focus on higher-value work. Twelve months later, that shiny new tool was sitting on the shelf, unused, and as useful as a dust gathering employee handbook.
Obviously, this isn’t a story about recruitment or technology, it’s about the illusion that tools alone can drive transformation, like the belief a new employee is a fix-all solution. The real lesson? Buying a tool is easy, creating the environment for it to succeed is where the challenge is, and what successful leadership is about.
The Tool Wasn’t Broken: My Thinking Was
I believed the tool, like a new employee, was magic, that it could take away our pain and win hearts and minds of my colleagues in the process. If the team just used the tool, the benefits would be obvious to all.
But I forgot something fundamental, people are actually the true agents of change. When something new feels complex, slows you down, or competes with existing habits, it’s human nature to revert to what’s familiar. We also never defined ownership or success. With the excitement of the initial purchase, we used the tool immediately on a major project, and for a brief moment it looked like a success story. But once that project ended, no one “owned” it. No KPIs, no accountability and so predictably, usage dropped. Then a few larger UI updates broke the tests, and fixing them took time the team didn’t have. Within months, the tool was abandoned.
I didn’t recognise or diagnose the cultural gap, and I confused the initial adoption with real impact or change.
Without ownership, accountability evaporated. Automation broke with each UI change, and I found that neither my team nor I had the time or the will to fix it.
The Shift in Perspective
The real failure wasn’t in buying the tool, it was in thinking a tool could fix a cultural problem.
I didn’t need automation as much as I needed clarity, a few simple questions would have helped me such as:
- Who owns testing?
- What does good testing look like?
- How do we measure improvement?
A tool amplifies what’s already there, but it can’t replace ownership, process, or curiosity. In hindsight, I’d been trying to automate my way out of a leadership challenge. If the process is broken, automation just helps you do the wrong thing faster. Tools can multiply capability, but they can’t substitute leadership.
Practical Takeaways
If you’re considering a shiny new automation tool:
- Treat tools like hires. Interview them, onboard them, manage their performance, and offboard them if they don’t deliver.
- Start with clarity, not code. Define ownership, outcomes, and process before you buy.
- Don’t outsource accountability. Tools can’t hold people to standards, only culture, defined by leaders can.
- Pilot deliberately. Use trial periods to prove value on one use-case before scaling.
- Budget for adoption, not just purchase. The tool isn’t implemented until people actually use it.
Closing Reflection
It turns out the worst hire I ever made wasn’t the tool, it was my belief that technology alone could lead change, as was my assumption that buying it solved the problem.
The next time you’re about to “hire” a piece of software ask yourself: Who’s actually leading this hire, is it me, or the hope that the tool will do the leading for me?