Hiring Is the Last Thing I Want to Delegate

Someone asked me once if I wanted to hand off hiring for an open role on my team. It was well-intentioned. I was stretched thin, and handing it to another fully capable manager would have been a reasonable thing to do.

I couldn’t do it.

To understand why, you would have to understand what hiring actually is. It looks like a process: a question set, a scorecard, a debrief. But that isn’t the whole story. It’s a series of judgment calls that only you can make for your team, and you’ll live with them long after the decision is made. The person you hire is still there six months later, a year later, shaping the culture and velocity of your team in ways you can’t fully control after the hiring decision is made. Every other call you make as a manager has a close. This one doesn’t.

There was a time in my past when another manager hired engineers for my team. I was on leave, and they did a genuinely good job. But I came back and inherited the consequences of someone else’s judgment calls. The good ones and the bad ones. When it didn’t work out, I was the one in the room having the hard conversations, doing the coaching, making the calls that follow. It was a lot of trust to place in a peer for something I had to live with long after they moved on to their next focus.

So when the offer came to delegate again, it hit a nerve. Hiring had to stay mine.

Part of that is ownership. But part of it is that judgment in hiring isn’t transferable. It takes years to build, and most of us learn it by doing.

Early in my management career I joined a part of the org that was aggressively hiring. It felt like all I did was interview. I remember watching a senior engineering manager who had clearly done this hundreds of times. He was calm, precise, never rattled. And I just kept thinking: how?

The answer was repetition. There was no shortcut.

What repetition gave me, eventually, was pattern recognition. I can hear now when a story glosses over something. When the logic doesn’t quite hold but the candidate is hoping I won’t press. When someone can’t go as deep as they’re implying they can. Early on I wasn’t hearing those things as easily. I was taking the stories at face value.

It also taught me that while I’m evaluating a candidate, they are absolutely evaluating me. How I run the interview, what I ask, how I react when they tell me something unexpected — all of it is data they’re collecting about what it would actually be like to work here. I’ve been in interviews where the interviewer kept a straight face and flat affect the whole time. I am physically incapable of it. I react to what people tell me. I let the conversation move where it needs to move. I get thanked by candidates for this more often than I expect to. That’s not me going easy on them. I’m just not creating artificial stress that obscures the actual signal. If someone performs badly because they’re terrified, I haven’t learned anything useful and neither have they.

The best hire I ever made reminded me why hiring is so difficult to hand to someone else. I recognized it in the interview. Every question I asked, they answered without assumptions. They clarified before they dove in. They were engineering for the future, not into a corner. That’s what I’m actually looking for. Not a list of traits but a way of thinking. Curiosity that refuses surface-level answers. Grit that shows up not as toughness but as the willingness to say: here’s where I failed, here’s what I’d do differently. Engineering is failing and trying again. Anyone telling me their tests always pass hasn’t worked on anything hard yet.

As my judgment improved, I found myself trusting a simple rule that I’ve kept ever since: if it’s not a hell yeah, it’s a heck no.

I arrived at this after an early debrief where I could tell the team wasn’t excited about a candidate. Nothing disastrously wrong, but nothing clearly right. They were visibly afraid we were going to hire this person just to fill the seat. They weren’t wrong to be afraid. That’s exactly what happens when you let the length of the search decide for you. You’re tired, the role has been open too long, and “good enough” starts to feel like a real option.

It isn’t.

A hiring mistake doesn’t stay contained. It spreads into the team’s velocity, the culture, your own calendar.

But the harder truth about hiring, and the one that took me longer to sit with, is what it feels like when the answer is no.

Sometimes the candidate in front of you is incredibly kind and is clearly trying so hard. They genuinely want the role. And they’re not the right fit for what the team needs right now. That’s devastating. I can accept I’m making the right decision, and it still never feels better no matter how many times I have to do it.

Early in my career, I wasn’t carrying that weight alone. I shadowed that senior engineering manager. We’d talk constructively about how the interviews went. There was a sounding board.

Now I do these interviews alone.

I sit down after the interview and I fill out the scorecard by myself. The weight of the decision is mine to carry.

What I’ve learned is that if it’s in my head, it can be harder to see clearly. So I write. Writing is how I find out what I actually think. I write what they did well and what they didn’t, and then I sit back and read it over. The decision gets clearer on the page than it ever does in my head. There’s something clarifying about having to put it into words.

I’ve been the tired EM. The one whose script is so memorized that my mind starts to drift mid-interview. I know what that feels like.

But I always pull my focus back. I have to. Because the person sitting across from me took time off, prepared, and is trying to show me something true about themselves. My team is counting on me to actually see it. The scorecard is mine to fill out alone. I owe them my full attention — and I owe my team my honest judgment, even when it’s hard to give.

Hiring is one of the highest-leverage things a manager does. The person you bring in changes the team. For a long time.

That’s why, whenever someone offers to take it off my plate, I hesitate.

There are plenty of things I’ll delegate as a manager.

Hiring isn’t one of them.