What if hiring isn't the answer?

In that context, hiring rarely starts from a blank page. It starts with team friction and capability gaps that slow delivery. Things slow down, decisions pile up, senior people become bottlenecks and ‘temporary’ external help sticks around. Then someone finally says it: we need to hire.

It sounds reasonable. It often is reasonable. And coming from someone in charge of staffing, you’d probably expect me to agree.

But what if hiring isn’t always the answer? That’s where many teams miss the real question. 

 

Where is the real friction in my team actually coming from?

Across digital teams in Belgium, a pattern shows up again and again. The work has evolved, but the way teams are designed hasn’t always followed at the same pace.

Digital work has shifted dramatically over the last few years. UX designers now think in product outcomes, and digital marketers are expected to be fluent in data, automation and analytics. All while teams get flatter, timelines get shorter, and tolerance for inefficiency gets lower.

But digital hiring plans often lag behind evolving role expectations. Job titles stay familiar, while the reality of the role quietly moves on. 

How do you spot friction and capability gaps?

One of the most reliable ways to diagnose the capability gaps is to look closely at where work gets ‘stuck’. Not where people complain, but where things consistently escalate. 

When the same decisions always land on the same desks, or when progress depends on one or two people being available, it’s rarely a capacity issue alone. 

It’s a capability and ownership issue that blocks delivery. 

Are you hiring out of reflex rather than making a conscious decision?

Under pressure, hiring tends to become the default answer. It signals action. It creates momentum. It reassures stakeholders that something is being done.

Digital leaders regularly tell me that the most exhausting part of hiring isn’t the search itself. It’s the time spent explaining the role, aligning expectations with people who don’t fully live in the digital context, and sitting through interviews that don’t quite get them closer to clarity.

That's rarely a market problem. It’s a lack of clarity and hiring strategy inside the team.

When teams skip the strategic step of assessing their digital team design and capability gaps (as opposed to which role is missing), hiring becomes guesswork.

What should my team be able to do six months from now?

This is a questions that rarely makes it into digital hiring discussions, yet it determines whether you’re closing a capability gap or simply adding headcount.

Not what tasks would be done. Not what tools they’d use. But which decisions would no longer escalate, and which dependencies would disappear?

When teams can’t answer that clearly, it’s usually a sign they’re trying to hire their way out of a design problem. 

In many teams, this reflection leads to a permanent hire — not because “we need more people”, but because the capability gap is structural and won’t be solved with temporary fixes. When that’s the case, getting the hire right matters far more than getting it fast. 

In many others, the faster impact comes from strengthening what already exists: clarifying ownership, expanding responsibility, or deliberately upskilling key profiles so senior people can stop being the glue holding everything together.

What matters is that the choice is made consciously.

What sets high-maturity digital teams apart

The highest-performing digital teams don’t scale by hiring aggressively. They scale by regularly recalibrating their team capabilities and digital team design.

Before opening a vacancy, they take a moment to reflect on questions that sound simple but rarely are:

• Where exactly do decisions slow down?
• Which skills are missing versus simply underdeveloped?
• If this role didn't exist, what would break first?

It also opens up other options. Sometimes hiring is the right move. Sometimes redesigning responsibility unlocks speed faster than adding headcount. Sometimes targeted digital upskilling and capability development removes the need for external support altogether.

The difference is intent.

Why this matters now

Digital teams are under constant pressure to deliver more with fewer resources. That reality isn’t going away. What can change is how teams decide what they truly need next.

The teams that move fastest over time aren’t the ones adding people at every sign of friction. They’re the ones that regularly recalibrate their capabilities and design their teams around what the work has actually become, not what it used to be.

Clarity, more than speed, is often the real accelerator. 

“Most digital teams don’t fall behind because they lack people. They fall behind because roles evolve faster than hiring plans, and no one creates the space to recalibrate capabilities before opening the next vacancy.”
 — Javier Cuadra, Director at Ariad

Before your make your next move

If you’re currently facing this question (whether the next step is hiring permanently, upskilling, hiring a contractor or reshaping responsibilities) that’s usually a sign that you’re paying attention to the right problem.

In my role, I spend a lot of time helping digital leaders think this through before they open a vacancy, precisely because the wrong move here creates friction for months. If you want to review your digital hiring strategy or want to sanity-check your team's capability gaps, I'm always open to a short conversation. 

Sometimes, slowing down the decision slightly is exactly what allows teams to move faster afterward.

Connect with Javier to discuss your digital hiring strategy