Hiring is expensive. Really expensive. You’ve got recruitment costs, onboarding, training, benefits, the ramp-up time before someone actually adds value. If we’re honest, bringing on a new team member often costs $50K-$100K in total investment across the first year, even for a non-senior role.
So when you’re thinking about hiring your next person, have you actually stopped to ask whether you need a person?
This isn’t about being cold or anti-human. It’s about being strategic with your resources. Some of the work people spend their time on can be handled far more cost-effectively with technology.
Let’s say you’re a growing company and you realize you need someone to handle customer data entry and basic reporting. That’s typically a $35-45K annual hire. But here’s the thing: 80% of what that person does could be automated. Forms could feed directly into your systems. Reports could be generated automatically. Data could be pulled from your applications without manual intervention.
Instead of hiring someone full-time, what if you invested $15K in building automation that does that work? You save $30K+ in year one, and in subsequent years, that investment keeps paying dividends while the hire would cost $35K every single year.
Or consider customer service. Instead of immediately hiring a second support person, what if you invested in a system that handles 30% of customer inquiries automatically—categorizing them, pulling relevant information, suggesting responses? Your current person handles 30% more volume without burning out, and you’ve bought yourself six months before you actually need to hire.
Here’s the framework that actually works:
First, understand what the new role would actually do. Get specific. How many hours per week? What tasks? What decisions would they make?
Second, identify what’s truly repetitive, rule-based, or data-driven. This is what can be automated. Things that require judgment, creativity, or complex decision-making—those need humans.
Third, calculate the ROI. If you can automate 50-70% of the work for $10-20K, that’s probably a good play. If it only automates 20% of the work, maybe hiring is still your move.
Fourth, automate the process, not the person. Then hire someone who handles the parts that actually need human attention.
The companies that are scaling smartly right now aren’t necessarily hiring fewer people. They’re being smarter about what they hire people to do. They’re automating the stuff that should be automated and freeing their team to do work that actually requires human judgment, creativity, and problem-solving.
Your next hire probably isn’t the person you think it is. It’s the person you can hire after you’ve automated away the repetitive work that was going to waste half their time anyway.
