Years ago I sat through a project review that looked perfectly reasonable. The milestones were sensible, the dependencies were documented, and the dates looked aggressive but achievable. The presenters had clearly spent serious time building the plan, and the deck was polished enough that most people nodded along.
Then someone mentioned several key deliverables depended on adding four engineers.
I asked a simple question: when do they start?
Nobody knew. Recruiting was not in the plan, interviewing was not in the plan, onboarding was not in the plan, and ramp-up was not in the plan. The plan simply assumed four fully productive engineers would materialize exactly when they were needed.
At the time, I thought the project had a hiring problem. I no longer think that. It had a planning problem.
A fake hiring plan is a plan that depends on future hires without explicitly planning the work required to define, recruit, close, onboard, and ramp those hires.
Fake plans are rarely written by dishonest people. They are written by optimistic people, pressured people, and leaders who want the plan to be true badly enough that they stop inspecting whether it is.
Reality does not care.
Why I Am Writing This Now
This post is the kickoff for a hiring curriculum I am building for Kindel Leadership Development, specifically for Leader of Leaders Training. The point of the curriculum is practical: help leaders stop treating hiring as a side activity and start treating it as core execution work.
Most leaders say hiring matters. Fewer leaders plan as if that statement is true. Many are not even aware there are concrete, learnable skills that can make them excellent at hiring. This curriculum is my attempt to close that gap.
The 5Ps Are A Completeness Test
More than twenty years ago, J Allard introduced me to a planning model he called the 5Ps: Purpose, Principles, Priorities, People, and Plan. I borrowed it and have used it ever since across product teams, startups, operating rhythms, and a few situations where I had no idea what I was doing.
The 5Ps are not sophisticated, which is exactly why they work. Purpose explains why the effort exists. Principles (or tenets; the words are synonyms) define the non-negotiable rules for decisions. Priorities force sequence (the same decision pattern I discussed in One-Way and Two-Way Doors). People names who is accountable, who approves, who is consulted, and who is informed. Plan says what happens, in what order, by what date.
A plan with no Purpose is busywork. A plan with no Principles re-litigates itself every week. A plan with no Priorities is a wish list. A plan with no People is hope. A plan with no Plan is a vision deck.
Fake plans show up whenever one of those components is implied instead of explicit.
Hiring Must Be In The Plan
The failure I see is hiring work is not fully represented in the Plan. The People section might identify who is responsible and who approves, which is necessary, but the Plan section still needs dates, dependencies, and accountable owners for how hiring actually happens.
Consider a roadmap that says, “Team grows from six engineers to ten engineers.” Many teams treat that line as an assumption. I treat it as an execution track that needs explicit sequencing, dependencies, milestones, and inspection points.
Who owns recruiting? Who owns role definition? Who owns interview loop quality? Who owns closing? Who owns onboarding? Who owns the first ninety days of ramp-up? Who decides whether a candidate bar was actually met? Who updates delivery commitments when hiring slips by sixty days?
The sentence “we will hire four engineers” can hide hundreds of hours of real labor, real risk, and real decision-making. Most plans include the expected benefit of future hires while excluding the work required to create those hires. That omission usually lives in the Plan P, not in a total absence of the People P.
That is not planning. That is wishing.
Hiring Is Not Support Work
If your project depends on additional headcount, then recruiting, interviewing, closing, onboarding, and ramp-up are not adjacent activities. They are part of execution and they belong in the plan of record.
In some cases, they are the critical path.
A schedule that assumes successful hiring but has no hiring milestones, dependencies, and named owners is not missing a few dates. It is missing an entire workstream. Organizations do not always notice this on day one, but reality eventually closes the loop.
Reality always wins; it just does not publish its schedule in advance.
The Ramp-Up Lie
Even plans that account for hiring often stop at the signed offer. That is just fake planning with slightly better optics.
An engineer starts Monday. Great. Now what?
Nobody becomes fully productive by Tuesday afternoon. New hires need context, relationships, system access, architecture knowledge, customer understanding, and a working model of how decisions get made on the team. In healthy organizations, this takes deliberate effort. In unhealthy organizations, it takes longer, and costs more.
Any project plan that assumes instant productivity is still fake.
The Diagnostic I Use
When someone presents a plan, I ask two questions.
- What absolutely must be true for this plan to succeed?
- Which of the 5Ps explains how each of those things becomes true?
If we cannot answer the second question, we probably found a hidden assumption. Hidden assumptions are where fake plans come from.
Most failures do not start in the Gantt chart. They start when leaders approve incomplete plans because the plan sounds plausible and the pressure is high.
The schedule is simply where incompleteness becomes visible.
Start Doing This Now
If you want to stop writing fake hiring plans, start with operating discipline, not motivational speeches.
First, require every major backlog to carry hiring work alongside customer-value work. If your roadmap has epics and stories for features, reliability, and growth, it should also have epics and stories for role definition, sourcing, interview loop design, close plans, onboarding, and ramp-up. If hiring work is not in the backlog, it is not being managed.
Second, treat launch readiness reviews as accountability checkpoints for hiring, not just for code. Leaders should have to show evidence that hiring milestones, dependencies, and owners are on track the same way they show burn-downs, bug trends, dependency status, and technical risks.
Third, make unresolved hiring risk visible at the same altitude as delivery risk. Do not bury it in a staffing assumption or a side comment. Put it in the review, name an owner, assign dates, and inspect it every cycle.
In short, do not rely on good intentions around hiring. Mechanize (see Mechanisms). You already have mechanisms to ensure the technical stuff gets done; build hiring into those same mechanisms.
Where This Goes Next
This is the first post in a hiring-focused sequence that will map into Leader of Leaders training modules. I plan to cover hiring as a lifecycle, role definition quality, interview signal, decision accountability, and onboarding and ramp-up as leadership work, not HR paperwork.
If this framing feels familiar, it should. It is the same muscle behind One-Way and Two-Way Doors and Work Backwards From The Customer: you do not get outcomes by asserting outcomes. You get outcomes by doing the work that makes those outcomes likely.
The best plans I see are not the most ornate plans. They are the most complete plans.
What fake hiring plans have you seen in the wild? Let me know in the comments.