August 20, 2026

The Hiring Cost of a Vaping Culture

Last week, I read a Sky News piece with a headline that lands like a brick: children should never vape. Not occasionally. Not recreationally. Not as some harmless rite of passage dressed up in neon packaging and bubblegum flavours.

The article, citing doctors' concerns and studies on the health impacts of vaping in children, is about public health. But it also shines a very bright light on something I see every week in hiring.

What gets normalised early becomes expensive later.

That is true in health. It is also true in leadership, hiring, and company culture. Especially in fast-moving businesses where everyone is busy, slightly sleep-deprived, and one bad decision away from calling chaos a growth strategy.

If you are a founder, CTO, COO or Head of People, this matters more than you think.

When 'just this once' becomes culture

One of the great tricks bad habits play is this: they rarely arrive looking dangerous.

They arrive looking convenient.

That is what makes them sticky. Nobody wakes up and says, 'Let us build a mediocre hiring culture that quietly damages the business for three years.' They say things like:

• 'We need someone in yesterday.'
• 'They are not perfect, but they seem smart.'
• 'We will sort the gaps after they join.'
• 'The process is too slow, let us skip a stage.'

Sound familiar? Good. It should.

Because this is how poor hiring discipline gets normalised. One shortcut. Then another. Then suddenly your definition of 'good enough' has slipped so far it needs a rescue helicopter.

The Sky News report points to doctors warning that vaping among children is linked to a wide range of health issues and should not be treated lightly. Source: Sky News, 'Doctors sound alarm over children vaping as studies find wide range of health impacts' (link).

The hiring parallel is blunt: small compromises create big downstream damage.

The real problem is not the habit. It is the signal.

Vaping is worrying not just because of the act itself, but because of what it signals. Access. Normalisation. Weak guardrails. Adults being too slow to deal with something that is clearly scaling faster than the response.

Hiring has the same problem.

When a business repeatedly makes rushed, poorly-scoped, under-evaluated hires, the issue is not just the individual hire. The issue is what that behaviour signals internally:

• Speed matters more than judgement
• Standards bend when pressure rises
• Managers are allowed to hire reactively
• Workforce planning is an optional extra

That is not a hiring issue anymore. That is a leadership issue wearing a hiring hat.

And leadership issues are always more expensive.

I have seen brilliant companies sabotage themselves this way. Not because they lacked ambition. Quite the opposite. They were moving quickly, growing fast, chasing targets, launching products, securing funding. All the sexy stuff.

But underneath, they had let weak hiring habits creep in like damp behind a freshly painted wall. Looks fine at first. Then the smell arrives.

In tech hiring, prevention is wildly underrated

Here is my controversial view, though it should not be controversial at all: most hiring pain is self-inflicted.

Not all of it. Markets can be tight. Great talent can be hard to find. Niche roles in cloud, cyber, infrastructure, data and BI can take real work. Fair enough.

But too many companies act as if hiring problems are weather. They are not. They are architecture.

If your role keeps stalling, ask yourself:

• Is the brief genuinely clear?
• Do stakeholders actually agree on must-haves?
• Is the package aligned to the market?
• Is the interview process assessing capability or indulging opinions?
• Are you trying to hire a unicorn on a donkey budget?

That last one always gets people a bit twitchy, but let us be adults.

You cannot demand deep cloud transformation experience, superb stakeholder management, operational resilience expertise, people leadership, and sector knowledge, then act offended when the market sends back a premium price tag. That is not market dysfunction. That is arithmetic.

What impressed me in the doctors' warning covered by Sky News is the clarity. Children should never vape. Full stop. No fluffy positioning. No performative ambiguity. Just a clear standard.

Businesses need more of that energy in hiring.

For example:

• We do not hire without a defined scorecard
• We do not open roles we cannot resource properly
• We do not confuse charisma with competence
• We do not let six interviewers assess six different jobs

Simple. Clear. Protective.

Bad hires are not isolated incidents

Whenever a bad hire happens, some leaders treat it like a freak event. A one-off. Bit unlucky. These things happen. Cue shrug.

No. Not good enough.

A bad hire is often the visible symptom of an invisible system failure.

Maybe the role was poorly scoped. Maybe the manager was unclear. Maybe the process was too slow and the best people dropped out. Maybe the business sold a fantasy internally and reality externally. Maybe nobody asked the hard questions because everyone wanted the role closed before quarter end.

Again, this is why the vaping story matters beyond the obvious headline. By the time a harmful pattern becomes visible, it has usually been building for a while.

That is exactly how hiring dysfunction works.

You usually see it too late, in forms such as:

• High attrition in year one
• Underwhelming performance masked by nice personality
• Managers spending months cleaning up avoidable gaps
• Delivery slowing because the wrong technical calls were made early
• Team morale dipping because others are carrying the load

And then comes the most expensive line in business: 'We may need to revisit the structure.'

Translation: we hired badly, built around it, and now the furniture does not fit through the door.

A simple framework: Guardrails before urgency

If you want to avoid this mess, do not start with speed. Start with guardrails.

Here is a framework I use with clients. Nothing fancy. Just effective.

Clarity

Define what the role is actually for. Not the wishlist. Not the kitchen sink version. The true business problem this person must solve in the first 12 months.

Calibration

Get stakeholders aligned before you go to market. If the CTO wants transformation, HR wants culture add, and finance wants a bargain, somebody needs an honest conversation before candidates enter the circus.

Consistency

Use the same criteria across interviews. Compare evidence, not vibes. Vibes are lovely for playlists, less useful for critical hires.

Consequences

Treat bad hiring decisions like operational risks, because that is what they are. Measure them. Learn from them. Fix the process, not just the person.

If you do those four things well, your odds improve dramatically.

Questions worth asking this week

If I were sitting with your leadership team tomorrow, these are the questions I would throw on the table:

• Where have we normalised poor hiring habits because we were under pressure?
• Which role in the business are we repeatedly failing to hire well, and why?
• Do our interviewers know what great looks like, or are they freelancing?
• What is the cost of one wrong hire in our most critical function?
• Are we solving talent issues early, or just reacting when things catch fire?

These are not theoretical questions. They go straight to execution risk.

Because whether you are hiring a Head of Data, a Cloud Architect, a BI Lead or a Cyber Security Manager, the principle is the same: the earlier you set standards, the less pain you buy later.

The grown-up move is to act before it looks dramatic

One reason businesses leave hiring issues too late is simple. The problem has not looked dramatic enough yet.

No public crisis. No obvious explosion. Just little signs. A role dragging. A manager settling. A team quietly compensating. Delivery getting clunky. Candidates declining because the process feels confused.

This is the corporate equivalent of saying, 'It is probably fine,' while standing in a room that clearly smells of smoke.

The strongest leaders I work with do something different. They act before the drama. They tighten briefs early. They challenge internal contradictions. They invest in process quality. They bring in specialist help before the search turns into a six-month ghost hunt.

Very boring. Very effective. Usually cheaper too.

Conclusion

The Sky News article is a health warning about children and vaping. Fair enough. But for anyone building teams, it is also a useful reminder that harmful patterns become dangerous when people get used to them.

That is the real danger in hiring.

Not one rushed decision. Not one compromised brief. Not one muddled process.

The danger is when that becomes how you operate.

So yes, listen when doctors sound the alarm. And if you are leading a business, take the lesson further. Set standards early. Guard them properly. And stop calling preventable hiring mistakes 'just part of growth'.

They are not.

They are a tax on leadership.

And trust me, that bill always turns up.

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