The Hiring Pattern You Don’t See
Hi, glad you’re here. This is one of those newsletters where I’m going to ask you to be honest with yourself for about three minutes. That’s all it takes.
A client kept hiring the same type of person. Every time she had an open VP role, she’d end up with someone who was analytically brilliant and interpersonally cautious. Three hires in two years, same profile, same eventual friction with the rest of the leadership team. She called me after the third one crashed out. That’s when I got curious.
When I asked her what she looked for in candidates, she said ‘intellectual rigor and independence.’ When I asked where that criteria came from, she paused. Then: ‘That’s what I valued in my first boss. The one who promoted me.’
The moment she said it, I watched something shift. Not relief exactly. More like the feeling you get when you find the thing you didn’t know you were looking for. She’d built an entire hiring framework around a pattern she formed twenty years ago. It wasn’t a conscious choice. It was a reflex. And it was creating a leadership team that looked exactly like the leader she used to admire, not the team she actually needed.
Here’s the part that stayed with me: she asked her team, after naming this, what they would’ve told her about the hiring pattern if they’d felt safe saying it. They had an answer ready. They’d been watching it happen. They just didn’t have the standing to interrupt someone else’s autopilot.
That’s how these patterns work at the senior level. They don’t announce themselves. They disguise themselves as judgment, as instinct, as ‘knowing what works.’ The decisions feel deliberate. But the pattern underneath them is running on autopilot. And it’s shaping your team, your culture, and your results right now, whether you see it or not. The people closest to you are often the ones least able to tell you it’s happening.
If something in today’s newsletter described a pattern you’ve suspected but couldn’t name, that’s exactly what Executive Triage is built for. One conversation. One pattern named with enough precision that you can’t unsee it once it’s on the page. $3,500. cynthiacorsetti.com/executive-triage
This week’s read: The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. It’s about how invisible systems shape behavior—in products, in organizations, in the patterns we don’t realize we’re following. Norman talks about mental models, the ones we carry without knowing it. That’s what a hiring pattern is. Worth reading if you want to understand how your own mental models are quietly running your decisions.
Your most important decisions aren’t being shaped by strategy. They’re being shaped by patterns you stopped questioning years ago. The first step isn’t changing the pattern. It’s seeing it.