Before You Hire Another Employee, Answer These 4 Questions

One of the most common sentences I hear from growing business owners is, “We need to hire someone.” Sometimes they’re right. But often what they really mean is that something isn’t getting done. Sales leads aren’t being followed up. Marketing has become inconsistent. Customer service is overwhelmed. Or the founder is spending 10 hours a week doing work they know they shouldn’t be doing.

For decades, our solution to those problems has been remarkably consistent. Create a job, bundle together a collection of responsibilities, write a job description, decide on a salary and find somebody willing to perform those tasks for roughly 40 hours a week.

That model isn’t disappearing. But AI, automation, fractional executives, freelancers, outsourced partners and global specialists give entrepreneurs far more options than we had even a few years ago. So before you create another job, ask a different question: What outcome are we actually trying to buy?

Start with the outcome, not the person

I recently went through this exercise in one of my own businesses. We wanted to increase the number of qualified sales opportunities we were generating, and the obvious answer seemed to be hiring more business development people.

But “hire another salesperson” wasn’t really the outcome we needed. We wanted a consistent pipeline of qualified conversations with the right potential customers.

Once we defined it that way, we started breaking apart the work required to produce those conversations. Someone had to identify target companies, research them, find the right decision-makers, develop messaging, conduct outreach, follow up, qualify responses and eventually have a meaningful conversation with the prospect.

Previously, we might have bundled most of that into one person’s job. Instead, we started separating the capabilities.

We use dedicated research support to identify and investigate prospects. Technology helps us find and organize contact information. AI can assist with research and developing personalized outreach, while automation can take some of the repetitive work out of the process. Our business development people can then spend more of their time on the work where people add the most value: building relationships, understanding what a prospect actually needs and moving a genuine opportunity forward.

We still need talented salespeople. In fact, getting the right people into those roles becomes even more important.

But we’re no longer hiring them to do everything associated with “business development.” We’re designing a system around the outcome we want and then deciding where human capability creates the greatest return. That’s a very different way to think about hiring.

Break the job apart before you fill it

This requires us to think about hiring in a different order. Start with the outcome. What needs to be different after you spend the money? Then identify the work required to produce that outcome. Only after you’ve broken down the work should you identify the capabilities needed to perform it. That’s where hiring decisions become much more interesting.

Some capabilities may require a full-time employee because the work is continuous, strategically important and benefits from deep knowledge of your business. Others may require an expert for only five hours a month. Some can be outsourced to a company that performs that function every day, while repetitive work may be automated, and increasingly, some work can be performed or assisted by AI.

This isn’t about replacing employees with technology. It’s about stopping ourselves from assuming that every capability gap requires another person on the payroll.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 illustrates why that distinction matters. Its survey of more than 1,000 employers representing over 14 million workers found that 73% expect to accelerate process and task automation, while 63% plan to augment their workforce with new technologies. At the same time, 70% expect to hire people with emerging skills.

Businesses aren’t choosing between people and technology. They’re redesigning the combination.

Small businesses have more options than they used to

This shift may be even more important for entrepreneurs because smaller businesses have always faced a capability problem. A large company might employ a Chief Marketing Officer, graphic designer, financial analyst, cybersecurity specialist, HR director and software developer. A 20-person company probably can’t. But increasingly, it doesn’t have to.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s 2025 Empowering Small Business report found that 58% of small businesses were using generative AI, up from 40% the previous year and 23% in 2023. Perhaps more interestingly, 82% of small businesses using AI said they had increased their workforce over the previous year.

That matters because it challenges the idea that technology and people are competing for the same seat. Small businesses can use technology to expand what their people are capable of doing while bringing in specialists and partners for capabilities they don’t need to own permanently.

A smaller company might have an experienced fractional marketing leader for part of the week, outsource cybersecurity to specialists, use AI for first-pass analysis, automate repetitive administrative work and employ a great internal marketer who coordinates the pieces.

The company doesn’t own all those capabilities through employment. It has access to them. That’s an important distinction because headcount comes in relatively large units. Capability doesn’t have to.

Ask four questions before approving another hire

The next time somebody in your business says, “We need to hire someone,” don’t immediately start writing the job description.

First ask: What outcome do we actually need? Be specific about what should change as a result of making the investment.

Then ask: What work creates that outcome? Break the proposed job into the actual activities required instead of relying on the job title to define them.

Next: What requires human judgment? Relationships, accountability, context, creativity and important decisions may need people, while other parts of the work may not.

Finally: What capability are we actually missing? Only then should you decide whether the best answer is an employee, specialist, outsourced partner, automation, AI or some combination of them.

You may go through that exercise and conclude that you absolutely need to hire someone. Now you know why you’re hiring them. But you may also discover that the $80,000 employee you thought you needed was actually five different capabilities bundled together because that’s how we’ve always designed jobs.

Build for capability, not size

For much of my career running professional-services businesses, growing the company and growing the team were closely connected. More clients created more work, and more work usually meant more people. That relationship is becoming less automatic.

Today, I can build a capability using an employee in one country, a specialist somewhere else, an outside partner, software, automation and AI. The challenge is designing those pieces so they operate as one system. For smaller businesses, that’s a significant opportunity. We may not have the headcount of a larger competitor, but increasingly we can access many of the same capabilities.

The next time your company hits capacity, resist the instinct to start with a job description. Start with the outcome. Then build the best system to deliver it.

One of the most common sentences I hear from growing business owners is, “We need to hire someone.” Sometimes they’re right. But often what they really mean is that something isn’t getting done. Sales leads aren’t being followed up. Marketing has become inconsistent. Customer service is overwhelmed. Or the founder is spending 10 hours a week doing work they know they shouldn’t be doing.

For decades, our solution to those problems has been remarkably consistent. Create a job, bundle together a collection of responsibilities, write a job description, decide on a salary and find somebody willing to perform those tasks for roughly 40 hours a week.

That model isn’t disappearing. But AI, automation, fractional executives, freelancers, outsourced partners and global specialists give entrepreneurs far more options than we had even a few years ago. So before you create another job, ask a different question: What outcome are we actually trying to buy?