Alex Pusenjak was sitting across from someone who ticked every box. The technical skills were sharp. The KPIs were being smashed. On paper, this person was exactly what the business needed.
The team, though, was falling apart.
"You can have someone who hits every KPI, they can build the best tech, but if they're demoralising for the entire team, look for people that don't just fit the culture, but make it better," says Alex Pusenjak, Global VP of People and Culture at Fluent Commerce and one of twelve winners in the HR Influence Awards 2026.
It's a scenario most people leaders have faced. Someone brilliant, productive, measurably excellent, who quietly (or not so quietly) makes everyone around them worse. The brilliant jerk. The rockstar who leaves wreckage in their wake.
What's striking is that every single winner of the 2026 HR Influence Awards admitted to making a bad hire. Not reluctantly. Openly. And the stories they told weren't really about the hire itself. They were about what happened next, how long they waited, what they ignored, and what they changed as a result.
Drew Mayhills, Chief Learning and Innovation Officer at AIM WA, still remembers the moment the penny dropped. He'd hired someone undeniably talented. Exceptional, even. The problem wasn't what they delivered. It was how they delivered it.
"The way in which they went about being exceptional had a disproportionate negative impact on the team. It eroded trust in the team and by the time I was trying to repair that, a lot of damage had already been done," Drew recalls.
He doesn't mince words about what he learned. "Netflix call it rockstar assholes, right? And what I've come to realise through it, it is a gift. It doesn't feel like a gift at the time, but the gift of it was, actually there's no place for that here. And actually I'd go one further and say, I don't think there's a place for that anywhere because you just pay a disproportionately high price for all the other stuff that you get alongside the rockstar output and performance."
That phrase, "disproportionately high price," kept surfacing across winner interviews. The cost of one misaligned hire isn't just a recruitment fee. It's months of morale damage, broken trust, and the invisible toll on the people who stayed and absorbed the impact.
Alex puts a timeline on it: "One wrong hire can often just take you back six months, 12 months to where you're looking to get to."
At OzHarvest, Sharon Gray has a hiring philosophy so direct it could fit on a sticky note: "If it is not a hell yes, it is a hell no."
She uses it across every hiring manager in the organisation. It's not a vague vibe check. It's a practical filter. "If you're not feeling it, even if everything great is on paper, if you're feeling that there is something not quite right, listen to your gut and make them, it's gotta be 100% hell yes," Sharon explains.
The reason she's so firm about it? She broke her own rule.
"The mistake I made was that I did not listen to my gut. I knew that person wasn't the right person for the team but I was a little maybe desperate or overly eager to fill the role. So I went against my rule, which is if it's not a hell yes, it's a hell no."
What happened next is worth noting. As the Chief People Officer at one of Australia's most recognised not-for-profits, Sharon could have buried the mistake quietly. Instead, she owned it publicly. "Other people could see from me that even though I'm the head of people and culture, I'm allowed to make a mistake. I'm allowed to learn from that mistake."
That visibility mattered. OzHarvest's internal surveys consistently show more than 85% of staff scoring the organisation as extremely psychologically safe. That kind of number doesn't come from having a policy about psychological safety. It comes from leaders modelling what it looks like to get it wrong, say so, and do better.
This is where tools like Compono Engage become useful. Measuring culture health and psychological safety with real data gives HR leaders the ability to spot patterns early, before one misaligned hire becomes a team-wide problem.
Deepak Singh, Founder of Mission and Rhythm and PeopleStack, takes a different angle. For him, the real mistake usually isn't the hire. It's what happens after the cracks start showing.
"Looking back, the mistake wasn't necessarily the hire, but firstly how I made that hire and then holding on too long," Deepak says. "Misalignment really fixes itself or it just doesn't. And the longer you wait, the more it costs everyone, the team, the team member, yourself and in the end your customers as well."
His advice now is to address it quickly, directly, and with empathy. "It's a relationship and sometimes some relationships don't work. Breakups are shit, but they don't have to be bad. We can deal with that in the right way and say, sometimes the environment, the connection isn't the right one. It doesn't mean anyone's a bad worker or not good or anything like that."
That reframe matters. The brilliant jerk narrative assumes one party is at fault. Deepak's version is more honest. Sometimes two good things just don't work well together. The problem is when leaders wait too long to acknowledge it. Drew Mayhills agrees: "Conflict avoided is conflict multiplied. Whether it's a difficult conversation with a colleague, respectfully challenging a senior leader's decision or just recognising that something's not working the way it should, the longer you leave it, the harder it's gonna be to address it."
Teresa Lilly, Founder of Culture Pilot Co, has a rule she gives to every hiring manager she works with.
"Whatever happens in an interview process, times it times 10 and that's the person you're going to get because they are on their best behaviour right now. So if they are talking over you, or they don't ask you a single question, they are never gonna do that when you're working with them."
Her own bad hire came from ignoring exactly that kind of signal. "I let my biases get in the better of me because I really wanted a certain profile of a person for the role and I ignored any other warning signs that maybe that wasn't the right fit for the business. And it was a pretty, had a big impact on the business that particular hire."
Teresa is equally sharp on what culture actually looks like in practice, and how it connects to the people you bring in. "You can say all the nice things, but if you promote somebody who treats people poorly, that is part of your culture. If people get special opportunities because of their relationships with certain individuals, that's your culture."
Events and perks? Teresa calls them "the frosting of culture." The real substance is in decisions. Promotions. Who you hire. Who you don't hire.
For organisations trying to align their hiring processes with cultural values, this framing is a useful compass. The candidate experience doesn't start at the job ad. It starts with the internal clarity about what good looks like, and what bad looks like too.
Not everyone frames the bad hire as a cautionary tale. Matt McFarlane, Founder and Director of FNDN, pushes back on the whole concept.
"Bad hire is such a challenging term," Matt says. "I've hired people that I've either misled or have had circumstances arise where they could no longer fulfil the needs of the role. I think it's that we often, often it just comes down to miscommunication. Like I think that tends to be nine times out of 10."
His perspective is grounded in a belief about people that some might call idealistic, but Matt says is simply true. "Almost nobody gets out of bed and goes, you know what, I'm gonna do a shit job today. People want to come to work, they wanna be productive, they wanna have a purpose, they want to enjoy the company of the people they're working with."
For Matt, when a hire doesn't work out, the first place to look is the system around them. Were expectations clear? Was the role communicated accurately? Did the leader create conditions for that person to succeed? If the answers are no, then calling them a "bad hire" is letting the organisation off the hook.
He takes this further when it comes to values and culture. Rather than only defining what good looks like, Matt pushes leadership teams to define the opposite. "What are the ways that we don't want them to rear their head?" Getting specific about what bad behaviour looks like, not just aspirational statements about what good looks like, helps hiring managers recognise misalignment before it becomes a problem.
The frameworks differ. Sharon's "hell yes or hell no." Teresa's "times 10" rule. Deepak's clarity on what good looks like in three, six, and twelve months. Drew's hard-won lesson about openness to feedback being a non-negotiable hiring signal. Matt's insistence that miscommunication is usually the culprit. Alex's distinction between culture fit and culture add, looking for "that unique culture special sauce that you're bringing to the table."
But the underlying principles are remarkably consistent.
First, act faster. Every winner who told a bad hire story said some version of the same thing: they waited too long. Whether it was loyalty, hope, or the discomfort of a difficult conversation, the delay always made things worse.
Second, own your mistakes visibly. Sharon hiring against her own rule and talking about it openly. Drew acknowledging that the damage was done before he stepped in. Teresa admitting her biases led the way. These aren't just lessons for the individual. They're signals to the organisation about what accountability looks like.
Third, get clear before you hire, not after. The pattern across all six interviews was a shift from reactive hiring (fill the seat, deal with problems later) to intentional hiring that starts with honest questions. What does this role actually need? What will success look like at three months? What behaviour will we not tolerate?
This is where a values-aligned hiring platform becomes more than a nice-to-have. When cultural alignment is built into the assessment process (not bolted on as an afterthought) organisations are far more likely to catch misalignment before it becomes a six-month recovery project.
There's a reason this topic surfaced in every single interview. The brilliant jerk problem isn't really about one bad hire. It's about what an organisation is willing to tolerate, and how quickly its leaders are willing to act when the answer is "too much."
Alex Pusenjak says it plainly: "It is very detrimental, especially when a manager or a people leader isn't stepping in to nip things in the bud or course correct poor behaviour or attitudes."
The winners of the 2026 HR Influence Awards are leading teams across aged care, education, fintech, global health, and food rescue. Their organisations look nothing alike. But on this, they agreed: the most expensive hire isn't the one who can't do the job. It's the one who can do the job brilliantly while making everyone else worse at theirs.
And the most powerful thing a people leader can do? Act sooner. Be honest about what went wrong. And build systems that make cultural alignment a feature of hiring, not a conversation that only happens after the damage is done.
Read the full feature articles for each winner mentioned in this piece:
About the HR Influence Awards The HR Influence Awards recognise the top 12 HR and people leaders across Australia and New Zealand who are shaping the future of work. Presented by Compono, the awards celebrate leaders who go beyond policy to drive real business and cultural outcomes.
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