You finally found the perfect hire. The one who did this exact job, at a company just like yours, for six years. No training required. You felt the relief of it. Someone who already knows the work, who can start Monday and contribute by Friday.
Six months later, you notice something. They still speak about problems, and solve them, the way their old company did. They reach for habits you've spent years trying to move away from. They're skilled, no question. But they're not quite yours. And then a recruiter calls them with a 20 percent raise, and they're gone, the same way you got them.
You didn't build anything. You rented a person for a while, and the lease ran out. That reminds me of high-level college sports these days and the way players transfer, sometimes every year.
The thing we keep telling ourselves
The story we tell is that hiring experienced people is the safe, efficient choice. Skip the cost of training. Skip the awkward months where someone is learning. Buy the finished product.
It feels efficient. It feels like avoiding risk. I'd argue it's the opposite, and that the feeling is the trap.
When you only hire people other companies have already developed, you've made a decision without quite saying it out loud: developing people is not something we do here. We let someone else absorb the cost, the time, the early mistakes, and then we take the polished result. It works beautifully, right up until you look around and realize you've assembled a team out of strangers, each one carrying the reflexes of a different culture, none of them shaped by yours.
Again, that makes me think of college sports in recent years. I'll stop coming back to that.
Think about what you actually bought. Not loyalty. Not shared values. Not a way of working that holds together when things get hard. You bought a resume. Resumes leave.
People are valued and developed are more likely to stay.
Cut flowers and gardens
There's an old distinction worth borrowing here. You can buy cut flowers or you can plant a garden.
Cut flowers are wonderful. They're instant, they're beautiful, and they require no patience at all. They're also dead the moment you buy them, and in a week you're back at the store, if not sooner. The experienced hire is a cut flower. Gorgeous on day one, gone before long, and you own nothing once they're gone.
A garden is slow. It's frustrating. Some of what you plant never comes up. But the person who started planting years ago has a yard full of flowers every spring, for free, forever, and the soil keeps getting richer. Cultivating your own people is the garden. It's the only version where, ten years from now, the person you grew has roots
And there's a free-rider problem buried in here. Every company buying cut flowers is quietly counting on some other company to keep a garden. The experienced person you keep poaching has to come from somewhere, and fewer and fewer organizations are willing to be that somewhere. Plant less, pay more to cut from the ones who still do.
What the data quietly confirms
If this felt true before you had any numbers, there are now some numbers.
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York looked into why recent graduates have struggled to find work since the pandemic. NPR had a great story on this recently. Everyone assumed AI was eating the entry-level jobs. The researchers found something less dramatic and more revealing: remote work. When people work apart, feedback drops, and the youngest workers, the ones with the most to learn, lose the most. One large tech company responded exactly the way you'd predict. It stopped hiring new graduates and started hiring people about a decade older, people who had already been trained somewhere else.
In other words, when the company stopped being able to develop people, it stopped hiring the people who needed developing. The pipeline didn't dry up by accident. Someone turned off the tap.
The companies that planted anyway
When Toyota opened its first wholly owned plant in Kentucky, it had no choice but to garden. There was nobody in Kentucky who had already run a Toyota line. So Toyota hired for mindset and taught the work. Mike Hoseus, who I've had on the podcast, came from Toys “R” Us, knew nothing about manufacturing, and told them so. They said he was exactly who they wanted. Every supervisor got a personal coach whose entire job was to teach the work and the culture.
Slow. Expensive. And almost impossible for a competitor to copy, which is rather the point. Toyota has described itself as a people development company that happens to make cars, and I keep coming back to that framing. I've written about it here and explored it in a conversation with Barry McCarthy. Jeff Liker put a name to the system in an episode: the “quality people value stream,” the idea that you develop a person as deliberately as you'd improve a product. When Toyota loses someone, leaders don't shrug and repost the job. They do problem-solving. They ask what would have kept that person.
That's a company that planted a garden. Everyone else is at the flower shop, wondering why they keep having to go back. Again. And again.
So before you post that job
The next time a job description lands on your desk demanding someone who has already done this exact role, somewhere else, for years, it's worth asking what you're really after. The skill? Or the comfort of skipping the part where you'd have to grow it yourself.
One of those you can own. The other one always belongs to someone else, and they're already getting the call.
