Waiting to Be Asked

Years ago I walked into a company that was about to spend real money hiring for a role they were sure nobody inside could fill. They had the job description written, the recruiter lined up, the budget approved. They wanted someone senior, someone sharp, someone who could take a messy function and make it run. Fair enough. That employee is hard to find.

While I was getting the lay of the place, I kept noticing a woman sitting off in a corner. She had a desk, a computer, a coffee mug. What she didn't have was much to do. I'd pass her in the morning and she'd be waiting. I'd pass her in the afternoon and she'd still be waiting, polite about it, the way employees get when they've stopped expecting anyone to hand them something real.

So one day I stopped and asked her about it. She told me she'd been there twelve, thirteen years. She'd started in one role, the role had slowly evaporated under her, and nobody had ever quite figured out what to do with her next. She wasn't a problem. She wasn't a complaint. She was just there, every day, doing the small things that landed on her desk and waiting for somebody to give her something to do.

Here is the part that matters. When I actually talked to her, when I asked what she'd done before this job, what she was good at, and what she'd like to do if given the opportunity…she lit up. Not in a desperate way. In a competent way. She knew this business cold. She'd watched it from that corner for over a decade. She understood the politics, the customers, the way the work actually moved, all the things you cannot teach a senior hire in a six-month onboarding no matter how much you pay them.

She turned out to be one of the best HR employees I ever worked with. The talent that company was about to go shopping for had been sitting twenty feet from the CAO's office the whole time, drinking lukewarm coffee, waiting to be asked.

I tell that story a lot, because the lesson in it is not 'go find your hidden gem.' It's quieter and more uncomfortable than that. Nobody had been cruel to that woman. Nobody benched her on purpose. She got overlooked the ordinary way people are often overlooked, a little at a time, by a company that was busy and well-meaning but never stopped to look at who was already in the room.

That is the real cost of hiring outward by default. It isn't only the recruiter fee and the salary premium for someone new, though those are real. It's that every outside hire for a job somebody inside could grow into sends a signal to the employees watching. And they are always watching. The signal is: the way up is out. We will pay a stranger for potential we won't notice in you.

You can feel what that does over time. The employees who could have grown stop reaching. Why would they raise their hand for the stretch project when the stretch roles go to employees who didn't have to earn the company's trust over time? They settle into their corners and hope to be seen. Some of them are brilliant in those corners, and you will never know it, because the system that would have surfaced them is the same system you keep paying to bypass them.

I'm not telling you to never hire from outside. Sometimes you genuinely need a skill nobody in the building has, and bringing in a fresh mind is exactly the right step. What I'm telling you is that 'we don't have anyone who can do this' is a conclusion most companies reach without ever having checked. They know their org chart. They don't know their people. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where your next best employee is currently sitting, waiting to be asked.

So before you write the job description for the outside hire, walk the floor. Not to inspect it. To actually see who's there. Ask the quiet, competent employee in the corner what she used to do, what she's good at, what she'd want if anybody bothered to ask. You may find your answer was on payroll the whole time.

And even if she isn't the answer, even if the role really does need an outside hire, something else happens when you ask. The employee in the corner finds out you noticed her. For somebody who's spent years assuming nobody did, that is not a small thing. That might be the thing that makes her stay, and reach, and become the employee you'd have gone looking for anyway.