Written by Michiel R. De Boer
A hiring manager describes their new recruit in glowing terms. Sharp. Insightful. Exactly what we needed. The interview process was rigorous: two rounds, a case study, a panel with senior leaders. This person stood out. They had the experience, the credentials, the quality of thinking. The decision felt easy.Six months later, the same manager is sitting across from me with a different expression. “They’re fine,” he says. “They do the work. But it’s not what I expected. They seem… smaller than they were in the interview.”I hear this specific phrase with surprising regularity. Smaller. As if the person who interviewed was somehow a larger version of the person who arrived. Which, in a very specific sense, is exactly what happened.The interview selected for a set of capabilities. The role activated a different set of conditions. And the conditions determine what the capabilities actually produce.The Problem Is Not The Hire: It Is The System That Receives Them
When a new hire underperforms relative to interview promise, the organisation’s default explanation is candidate error: the person oversold themselves, the references were misleading, the interview process was not rigorous enough. The response, accordingly, is to make the selection process more rigorous, more rounds, more structured assessments, more behavioural interview questions.Sometimes that is the right diagnosis. But in my experience, it is the right diagnosis far less often than organisations assume.The more common pattern is this: the organisation selected a person whose capabilities are genuine and whose motivation is real, placed them in conditions that are systematically inhospitable to both, and then concluded, when performance did not materialise, that they had chosen wrong.They had not chosen wrong. They had built the wrong conditions.Amy Wrzesniewski and Barry Schwartz, writing on motivation in organisational contexts, distinguish between instrumental orientation: doing the work as a means to other ends, and internal orientation: doing the work because it is intrinsically meaningful. Research consistently shows that the two orientations produce different quality of performance, different levels of creativity, different resilience under difficulty. People with strong internal orientation do not simply work harder. They work differently: with more initiative, more problem-ownership, more tolerance for ambiguity and setback.And internal orientation is not a fixed personality trait. It is, to a substantial degree, produced by the conditions the organisation creates.The new hire who was exceptional in interview was, in many cases, someone whose internal motivation was activated by the quality of the conversation, the clarity of the challenge, the sense that they were being seen and taken seriously. The interview created the conditions. The role, as it was designed and managed, did not sustain them.
What The Interview Actually Measures
Structured behavioural interviewing (the gold standard of selection research) does a reasonably good job of measuring past behaviour in defined situations. It is a better predictor of future performance than unstructured interviews, which primarily measure likability and the ability to construct a compelling narrative under mild social pressure.
What neither approach measures well is person-environment fit: the degree to which the conditions of the actual role will align with the conditions under which this particular person does their best work.
Amy Kristof-Brown’s foundational research on person-environment fit distinguishes between several types. Person-job fit is the alignment between a person’s skills and the job’s requirements: what most selection processes are primarily designed to assess. Person-organisation fit is the alignment between a person’s values and the organisation’s culture. Person-group fit is the alignment between the individual and the team they will join. Person-supervisor fit is the alignment between the individual and the manager they will work under.
Research shows that all four types of fit independently predict performance, commitment, and retention. Selection processes typically assess one of them, person-job fit, with moderate rigour, and assess the others informally or not at all.
The person who was exceptional in interview often demonstrates strong person-job fit: their skills match the requirements. What the organisation failed to assess was whether the environment (the culture, the team, the manager, the actual daily conditions of the role) would sustain the motivation and initiative that made those skills visible.
The First Ninety Days: Where Internal Orientation Goes To Die
The most critical period for a new hire is also the period most organisations manage least intentionally.
Onboarding research is consistent on this point. BambooHR’s research on employee turnover found that approximately 30 percent of new hires leave within the first six months. SHRM data suggests that effective onboarding can improve retention rates by 82 percent and productivity by over 70 percent. Yet the majority of onboarding programmes are administrative rather than experiential: focused on system access, compliance training, policy documentation, and organisational chart orientation.
What they do not do is deliberately build the three conditions that Self-Determination Theory identifies as foundational to intrinsic motivation: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
Purpose, in the onboarding context, means the new hire understanding not just what they are supposed to do, but why it matters, in a way that connects to what they care about, not just to what the organisation cares about. This requires a conversation, not a presentation. It requires the manager to know something about what motivates this specific person, which requires having asked.
Mastery, in the early months, means the new hire having regular, specific feedback that tells them how they are doing, not in a review, but in the flow of the work. It means being stretched appropriately: given challenges that are real enough to be interesting and supported enough not to be isolating. Most new hire managers, overwhelmed with their own delivery responsibilities, default to under-stretching new hires in the early months. “Let them settle in.” The problem is that settling in, without feedback and without meaningful challenge, is where internal motivation begins to erode.
Autonomy, perhaps most critically, means the new hire having genuine ownership of how they approach the work, not just what work gets done. In high power-distance environments where deference to seniority is the cultural norm, this is especially easy to get wrong. A new hire who came with ideas and initiative learns, in the first few months, that ideas need to be cleared before they are voiced, that initiative outside the defined scope is not welcome, that the safest posture is to wait to be directed. They adapt. And in adapting, they become exactly the smaller version of themselves that their manager observed.
The APAC Dimension: Expectation Gaps Across Cultural Registers
There is a specific challenge in APAC hiring that is worth naming directly.
Many APAC organisations recruit internationally, from global talent pools, from diaspora professionals, from within the region’s diverse cultural landscape. They conduct interviews in a professional register that is relatively culturally neutral. The candidate performs in that register. The role, once entered, operates in a different cultural register entirely: one with specific expectations about hierarchy, communication styles, consensus-seeking, and the appropriate scope of individual initiative.
The new hire’s underperformance is not a capability gap. It is an expectation gap: between what the interview implied about the culture they were entering and the culture they actually found.
I have seen this happen in both directions. A professional from a low-context, low power-distance background joins an organisation where hierarchy is substantive and deference is expected, and is perceived as brash, presumptuous, or politically careless. A professional from a high-context, high power-distance background joins a flat, direct, challenge-encouraged culture and is perceived as passive, insufficiently assertive, waiting to be told what to do.
Neither person has underperformed relative to their capability. Both have been placed in conditions that are misaligned with their natural operating style, and neither has been given adequate information or support to bridge the gap.
The Onboarding Gap As An Organisational Design Failure
It is worth saying clearly: the underperforming new hire is almost always a symptom of an organisational design failure, not an individual failure.
If your selection process consistently produces hires who perform below interview promise, the issue is not the quality of your candidates. It is the degree to which your conditions are designed to sustain the capabilities you selected for.
This is a more demanding diagnosis than “we hired wrong,” because it requires the organisation to look at itself, at the conditions it creates, the feedback its managers give, the signals it sends in the first ninety days about what initiative looks like here, what is valued here, how much of a person’s actual capability will be welcome here.
But it is also a diagnosis that leads somewhere. You cannot reliably improve selection to the point where it perfectly predicts performance in conditions you have not changed. You can change the conditions.
Practical Recommendations
Design onboarding around the three motivational foundations, not around compliance. Build a ninety-day plan that explicitly includes: at least one conversation in the first week about what this person cares about professionally and what kind of work environment brings out their best; a defined cadence of developmental feedback meetings with the direct manager (not performance reviews: developmental conversations); and a genuine early assignment, not busywork, but something real, with real stakes and real support.
Conduct entry interviews, not just exit interviews. At thirty days and ninety days, ask new hires directly: what surprised you about this role that you did not expect? Where have you found the conditions harder than you anticipated? What would help you do your best work here? This data is the early warning system that most organisations are currently running without.
Train managers to manage the fit dimensions, not just the performance dimensions. Most management development focuses on task management, performance monitoring, and goal-setting. Very little of it focuses on the relational conditions that determine whether a new hire’s internal motivation activates or erodes. The questions a manager needs to be able to ask and act on are not complex: What matters to this person? What conditions help them think well? What kind of feedback do they need? How much autonomy are they ready for, and how do I extend it in a way that is supported rather than abandoning?
Make the cultural expectations explicit. In APAC contexts especially, the gap between the culture implied by the interview and the culture experienced in the role is frequently wide and almost never named. A simple practice: during the offer and pre-boarding stage, have an honest conversation about what working here actually looks like day-to-day: the communication norms, the hierarchy dynamics, the pace, the degree of individual initiative that is encouraged and the degree that is not. Not as a warning. As a service. People can adapt to almost anything if they know in advance what they are adapting to.
Look at the job design, not just the person. If a role consistently produces underperformance relative to candidate quality, the role may have a design problem. Is the scope too narrow to engage someone genuinely capable? Are the decision rights too limited to allow meaningful ownership? Is the reporting structure too layered to allow direct accountability? These are questions worth asking before the next hire.
The Design Question Beneath The Hiring Question
The story of the new hire who underperforms is told, in most organisations, as a story about a person. She did not live up to her potential. He was not what he seemed. They have not yet found their feet.
The more accurate version, in most cases, is a story about conditions. The organisation built a selection process that identified genuine capability and genuine motivation. It built an environment that did not sustain either. And then it blamed the candidate.
Motivation and fit are organisational design questions. They are not settled at the point of hire. They are actively produced, or actively undermined, by the conditions an organisation creates in the first three months of a person’s tenure, and sustained or eroded by the conditions it creates in every month that follows.
The hire did not become smaller. The environment did not make room for everything they were.
That is the organisation’s problem to solve. And it is entirely solvable.
The Question Worth Sitting With
Think about the last person your organisation hired who seemed exceptional in interview but did not live up to that promise in role.
The question worth sitting with is not what you selected for. It is what conditions you built for them in the first ninety days. Were those conditions designed to sustain the motivation and initiative you saw in the interview? Or were they designed to inform, orient, and move on?
If the conditions have not changed, the next hire will produce the same result.
This is Piece 2 of an eleven-part series exploring the patterns behind organisational dysfunction: and what the GITO® Approach reveals about addressing them at the system level.
The next piece: The high-performer who stops performing: and nobody noticed: motivation erosion is invisible until it is irreversible.
