Hire the expertise your team needs. Then let it do its job.
It’s easy to warm to a candidate who thinks like you. The conversation flows, you agree on the priorities. They approach problems in a familiar way, and you can immediately picture working together - and they may well be a great hire. But before making the offer, there’s a question worth asking:
What will this person bring that we don’t already have?
A team can be full of talented people and still have significant gaps. Adding another person with the same strengths may increase capacity, but it won’t necessarily give the business what it needs to grow.
Look at what’s missing:
A commercial team might have excellent relationship builders but struggle to turn those relationships into consistent revenue. More introductions won’t fix an unclear sales process, weak qualification or a poor handover into onboarding.
A payments business might be winning merchants faster than it can integrate them. Another strong salesperson could bring in more business, while an experienced implementation leader could help the company deliver on what it has already sold.
The same applies across product, operations, technology and compliance.
Before opening a role, look honestly at where the team is strong, where it is stretched and where progress keeps getting stuck. Sometimes the person you need will approach the business very differently from you. They may ask questions you haven’t considered or put more weight on things you’ve always treated as secondary and that difference could be their biggest contribution.
Hire for where the business is going:
Every hire has an immediate purpose. There’s work to do, a gap to fill or a target to hit, but the appointment also needs to make sense beyond the next few months. If transaction volumes increase, the business enters new markets or the team doubles in size, what will need to work differently? Which decisions can no longer sit with the founder? What knowledge needs to exist inside the business?
Someone who can manage today’s workload may be a good appointment. Someone who can manage it and build the capability for the next stage may be a much more valuable one. That doesn’t mean every role needs a more senior title or a bigger salary, but it does mean being clear about the judgement, experience and ownership the business will need as it develops.
Then trust the expertise you’ve hired:
This is where a good hiring decision can lose its value - you bring in an expert because they know something the business needs. Then, once they arrive, you question their recommendations, prescribe how they should work and expect them to follow the approach already in place.
If you hire expertise, you have to give it room to influence decisions.
An experienced operations leader may introduce structure that initially feels uncomfortable. A product specialist may challenge a roadmap built around individual client requests. A commercial leader may question whether every opportunity is worth pursuing.
Those conversations are part of the value you hired. You should ask questions, test their thinking and agree clear expectations. Expertise still needs accountability. But there’s a difference between holding someone accountable for an outcome and controlling every step they take to achieve it - in summary, don’t hire an expert and then spend your time trying to out-expert them.
Build a team whose knowledge you can rely on:
As a business grows, the founder or leadership team cannot remain the source of every answer. Hiring well means bringing in people whose judgement you can rely on in areas where their experience goes deeper than yours. It also means allowing that knowledge to improve how the wider team works.
That requires confidence from both sides: the specialist needs the confidence to challenge, and the leader needs the confidence to listen. The aim is to build a business that can make better decisions, take on more complexity and grow without everything coming back to the same person. So, before your next hire, ask:
- What expertise do we already have?
- What capability are we missing?
- What will the business need at its next stage?
- Are we prepared to give this person the authority to contribute fully?
Hire the skills the team needs today while thinking carefully about what it will need tomorrow and then, crucially, let the people you’ve hired bring their expertise to the table.
If you're a start-up or scale-up looking to hire in the payments space, please reach out: bn@payments-recruitment.co.uk
