Growing your team in Derbyshire: the people problems that keep coming back

I was at a networking event in Clowne last week, talking to a group of business owners about hiring.

One of them was describing their recruitment process in real detail: two or three interview rounds, a culture fit session, the works! Proper effort had gone in.

And then they said: “We still can’t find decent candidates. The standard is just really poor out there.”

I smiled and nodded… but on the inside, I was thinking: that is not a candidate problem!

There are hundreds of thousands of people looking for work across the East Midlands and the UK in general. Good people, experienced people, people who would do a solid job for you.

The idea that none of them are good enough for your business is almost never the reality though. What’s usually happening is that the recruitment process is filtering out the right candidates, or bringing people in and then losing them before they’ve properly landed. The process looks thorough but the problem is hiding inside it.

This is one of the most common patterns I see in growing Derbyshire businesses: a real problem keeps coming back and the founder has a completely reasonable explanation for why it’s happening, and that explanation is wrong.

The explanation that’s always just slightly off

It’s not just hiring; the same pattern shows up everywhere.

Someone leaves after four months.

The conclusion: wrong hire, move on. But why did they leave? Were they actually set up properly when they started, or were they handed a laptop and a vague job description and told to get on with it? Did anyone check in properly in those first few weeks, or was it assumed they’d ask if they needed something?

A manager keeps making decisions you’d have made differently.

The conclusion: they need to step up. But were they ever told how you make decisions? Was there a conversation about what you’d want them to handle and what you’d want escalated? Or were they promoted because they were brilliant at the job, and it was assumed managing people would just follow?

Someone is underperforming but nothing changes.

The conclusion: it’s just who they are. But has anyone had a direct, honest conversation with them about what’s expected? Not a hint. Not a comment in a catch-up. An actual conversation, clearly, with documented expectations? Usually not.

In each case, the surface explanation isn’t wrong exactly. But it’s the second or third layer down where the real cause is sitting, untouched, ready to create the same problem with the next person.

The recruitment process that was definitely not the problem

Back to Clowne. The business owner with the three-stage process wasn’t being lazy or careless. They’d put real time into hiring.

But I kept coming back to the same question: what were all those rounds actually assessing for?

Because what I’ve found when I’ve asked that question is that most founders can describe the job. They can tell me the tasks, the experience they’re looking for, roughly what the person needs to have done before. But what good actually looks like in the role, the specific behaviours, the way of approaching problems, the thing that separates someone who thrives from someone who struggles six months in… that’s usually much hazier.

And don’t get me started on “culture fit” because that’s where it gets interesting!

When I ask founders what they mean by it, there’s usually a pause. Then I get “personality” or “someone who just gets it” or “you know it when you see it”. Which is all fine as a feeling...

But it’s not something you can assess for consistently across two or three interview rounds.

What’s actually happening across those rounds is that different people in the room are running their own version of a vibe check, reaching different conclusions, and nobody can clearly explain afterward why candidate A felt right and candidate B didn’t. That’s not a rigorous process!

If you can’t define what you’re looking for before the interview starts, you can’t tell me whether you found it afterwards.

So the process keeps running, the hires keep disappointing, and the conclusion stays the same: poor candidate pool.

Activity without clarity

The recruitment example is a particularly clear version of something that runs through almost every recurring people problem in a growing business.

The activity is there: the rounds, the sessions, the effort, the conversations. What’s missing is the clarity underneath it.

What are we actually trying to find here?
What does good look like in this role?
How will we know when we’ve got it?

You see the same gap in how businesses bring people in once they’ve been hired.

There’s usually some kind of onboarding (a first day, a few introductions, maybe a sit-down with the manager), but nobody has defined what “settled in” actually looks like at 30 days, or 60, or 90. So it’s impossible to tell whether the person is on track or quietly struggling until it’s too late to fix it.

You see it in how performance is managed.

Expectations exist, but they’re in the founder’s head, not written down anywhere. So when someone isn’t performing, the conversation is vague, the person is confused, nothing changes… and the conclusion is that they’re just not good enough.

Without the clarity, the most elaborate process in the world is just motion disguised as action.

And motion without direction tends to bring you back to the same place.

Why the problems keep coming back

Most founders I work with didn’t set out to cobble things together. They hired when they needed to. They dealt with problems as they came up. They did their best with the time they had.

But “good enough for now” has a habit of becoming “the way we do things” and by the time the cracks are visible, there are usually quite a few of them.

The businesses that break the cycle are the ones that get underneath the surface explanation, find the real cause, and fix that instead. They’re not the ones doing the same thing and working harder to solve the same problems, expecting a different outcome.

That takes a bit of honest examination.

Sometimes you need someone outside the business to ask the right questions, because from the inside, the explanation that makes sense is usually the one you’ve already landed on.

Are you solving the problem, or the explanation for it?

Before you redesign your interview process, rewrite your job descriptions, or tell your managers to do things differently, it’s worth making sure you know what’s actually causing the problem. Not the surface explanation. The one underneath it.

That’s what the People and Growth Diagnostic is designed to do. It’s a structured look at how your business actually runs its people: what’s working, what isn’t, and what the real causes are behind the things that keep coming back. You come away with a clear, prioritised plan so you’re fixing the right things, in the right order.

It works entirely remotely, so wherever you’re based across Derbyshire or the UK, it fits around how you work.