Hired from the top. Fired from the bottom.

Every career has two waterlines. The one at the top decides who gets in. The one at the bottom decides who stays.

The hiring waterline is high. It is set by senior people in clean rooms. The candidate is polished. The resume has been edited. The references are coached. The interviews are scheduled and short. Everyone is on their best version of themselves. The decision gets made by the people farthest from the daily work, and it gets made on the strength of the candidate's narrative.

The firing waterline is low. It is set by the people who sit next to the new hire every day. They watch the work. They watch the meetings. They watch what happens when the deadline gets tight and the meeting runs over and the call doesn't go well. They see the version of the person the interview did not show.

This is the iceberg.

The tip of the iceberg is what the candidate can do. Credentials. Skills. Resume. Interview performance. The polished surface that you hire from. The part you can verify in an hour.

Below the waterline is what the candidate is willing to do. How they handle pressure. How they treat the person below them. Whether they tell the truth when the truth is uncomfortable. Whether they finish the unglamorous parts of the work. Whether they stay in the room when the room gets hard.

Capability gets you hired. Willingness keeps you there.

Most companies hire on the part of the iceberg they can see and fire on the part they could not. The cost is enormous. A retained search firm bills a hundred and eighty thousand dollars. The hire takes six months to acclimate. The team takes another six to push them out. A full year of payroll, distraction, lost momentum, and damaged trust. All of it because the hiring decision was made above the waterline.

The fix is not to lower the hiring standard or raise the firing standard. The fix is to look underneath the waterline before the offer goes out. The people who will work with the hire need to be in the room when the decision gets made. The references need to be the ones the candidate did not give you. The questions need to go past capability and into willingness. Not what have you done. What are you willing to do when no one is watching.

Every failed hire is two failures. A failure to read the person at the top. A failure to listen to the people at the bottom.

The best founders I know hire as if both waterlines belong to them. Because they do.