Our Head of Engineering seat has been vacant for six months, and we are falling behind on our product roadmap. We have found a candidate who is a perfect core values fit but lacks the necessary technical capacity for the seat, and another candidate who has the technical skills but scored poorly on our core values. Should we compromise to fill this empty seat?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

You must never compromise on either core values or GWC. Hiring a candidate who is a poor core values fit will introduce toxicity into your culture, alienate your existing team, and ultimately force you to go through a painful termination. Hiring a candidate who lacks the capacity to do the job means your product roadmap will continue to suffer, and your leadership team will end up doing their work for them.

When you are stuck with a vacant seat, you must look at your short-term structure. In EOS, if a seat is vacant, the person sitting in the box above it on the Accountability Chart must temporarily own the seat and its responsibilities. This is usually your Integrator.

The Integrator must either manage the engineering team directly or delegate specific tasks to existing team members as temporary Rocks. While this is painful and limits your capacity in the short term, it keeps the pressure on the organization to find the right person for the right seat. Keep searching, refine your recruiting process, and maintain your standards. A bad hire takes far longer to recover from than a temporary vacancy.