Latest / Hiring & Firing with Fexingo: Recruitment, Performance, and Workforce Decisions / How a Pre-Hire Work Audit Saved 1.2 Million in Wasted Salary
Transcript
- Lucas: So there's this mid-size B2B software company — about 400 employees, growing fast — and they ran the numbers on their last two years of hiring. The number they found was one point two million dollars. Luna: One point two million — in what, exactly? Lucas: Wasted salary. Not severance, not bad hire write-offs in the traditional sense. They calculated the total compensation paid to employees whose jobs, by month six or nine, had drifted so far from the original job description that the company was effectively paying for work it didn't need. Luna: That's a staggering number for a company of that size. How did they even track that? Lucas: They did something called a pre-hire work audit. And honestly, I'd never heard the term before I spoke to their VP of People Operations. The idea is simple: before you post a job, you map the actual day-to-day tasks the role will perform — not the aspirational list from a job description written eighteen months ago. Then you compare that map to similar roles currently in the org. And what they found was that about 40 percent of their new hires were filling responsibilities that had quietly evaporated. Luna: Forty percent — so almost half the hires were for ghosts? Lucas: Exactly. And I think this is something a lot of companies miss. We talk a lot about behavioral questions, culture fit, reference checks — all of which matter. But if the role itself is misaligned with reality, the best hire in the world is going to fail or, worse, succeed at work that doesn't move the needle. Luna: Right, and it's not just about failing. It's the opportunity cost of having someone doing irrelevant work while a critical need goes unfilled. Lucas: Exactly. And I want to be clear — we don't run ads on this show. That's a deliberate choice because we want every episode to be useful without interruption. If you've found value in these conversations, and you'd like to support that ad-free approach, there's a link at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just a way to keep this independent. Luna: Yeah, it's a small way to help us keep doing deep dives like this one. And speaking of deep dives — how did the audit actually work on the ground? Lucas: They started with a six-week pilot in the engineering department. The VP of People Ops sat down with every engineering manager and asked them to list, in order of time spent, the top five tasks each of their direct reports performed in a typical week. Then they pulled the original job descriptions for those roles and did a comparison. Luna: What did they find? Lucas: In one case, a senior backend role had been hired to build a new microservices architecture. By the time the person started, the company had pivoted to a platform approach that didn't need that architecture. The engineer spent the first six months doing maintenance work that a junior dev could have handled. They were paying one hundred and sixty thousand dollars a year for work worth about eighty. Luna: So the gap was obvious once they looked — but nobody caught it because the job description was never updated. Lucas: Right. And the audit revealed this across multiple departments. In product, they had a senior product manager whose entire job was managing a feature set that had been deprecated. In sales, they had two enterprise reps covering accounts that had been reassigned to a different team six months prior — but no one told the reps, and no one canceled the open reqs. Luna: Wait — so they were still hiring for roles that overlapped with existing people doing nothing? Lucas: Exactly. The audit uncovered four open reqs that should have been closed immediately. That alone saved the company about five hundred thousand dollars in the first year, because those positions never got filled. Instead, they reallocated the headcount to actual gaps. Luna: That's a huge win from just sitting down and asking managers what their teams actually do. Lucas: It sounds simple, but the pushback was real. Some managers felt threatened — like the audit was a performance review in disguise. Others argued that the drift was intentional, that roles need to evolve. And they're not wrong. But the point is, the evolution should be conscious, not accidental. Luna: How did they handle the pushback? Lucas: They framed it as a resource optimization exercise, not a critique. They showed managers that by redefining roles, they could actually hire for the work that mattered — which meant less frustration for the team because new hires would hit the ground running. And they backed it up with data: teams that went through the audit saw time to productivity drop by an average of 30 percent. Luna: Thirty percent — that's a massive improvement. What drove that? Lucas: Two things. First, the job descriptions became accurate, so candidates self-selected better. Second, the onboarding could be built around actual tasks, not hypotheticals. New hires weren't spending the first two weeks unlearning the job description. Luna: It sounds like a simple fix, but I imagine it requires a lot of discipline to do consistently. Lucas: It does. The company now does a mini audit every quarter — just a one-hour meeting with each manager to review any changes in the team's work. They also tied it to the hiring process: before any new req is approved, the manager has to submit a current task map. It's become a cultural norm. Luna: I think the key insight here is that most hiring processes assume the job is static. But in fast-moving companies, the job changes faster than the job description. Lucas: Exactly. And the cost of that assumption is one point two million dollars in this case. I think the number is actually conservative because they only counted direct salary — not the cost of onboarding, the loss of productivity from misaligned teams, or the opportunity cost of unfilled critical roles. Luna: That last point is huge. If you're hiring for a role that's already obsolete, you're not just wasting that salary — you're also not solving the real problem that's probably getting worse. Lucas: Right. And I think the lesson for listeners is: before you post your next job req, spend thirty minutes mapping what the person will actually do in week one, month one, month three. Then check if that map matches something you already have filled elsewhere. Luna: And if it matches, maybe you don't need to hire at all — you just need to redeploy. Lucas: Exactly. That's a whole other episode, but it's a good place to leave it for today.