The Hiring Trap
More people hired. Less delivered. Every year.
What is the hiring trap at DHCW? Headcount grew 80% — from 675 to ~1,263 staff — while delivery worsened. Brooks's Law operated at organisational scale: each new cohort imposed onboarding burden on the productive staff already overstretched, and coordination overhead grew faster than output. The headline flow (recruitment) looked healthy; the underlying stock (delivery capability) was draining.
When delivery falls behind, the instinctive response is to hire. DHCW grew from 675 to roughly 1,263 staff – an increase of 80%, with 22.6% growth in the last year alone.
What is the Hiring Trap at DHCW?
Brooks’s Law, documented in 1975, explains why adding people to a late programme makes it later. Each new hire pulls experienced staff away from delivery and into onboarding and coordination. Communication overhead grows with the square of team size. In a specialised domain, new hires take 6-18 months to become productive.
The headcount appears on the dashboard immediately. The productivity does not.
Delivery capability drops despite more people. Political pressure intensifies. The response: hire even more.
How It Manifests at DHCW
At DHCW, the problem goes beyond Brooks’s Law. The evidence from L8: The Loyalty Selection Loop shows that hiring prioritises loyalty over competence. New hires don’t just add coordination overhead – they add negative delivery value because they lack the skills the role requires. The 80% headcount growth isn’t diluting capability. It may be actively degrading it.
The CEO was asked what patient benefit corresponded to a 25% workforce expansion. Her answer: “It would be lovely to sit here and be able to demonstrate the value.”
The Finance Director of the Year (2022 award) could cite only £0.5M in non-cash time savings from ~£600M of Welsh Government funding – 83p of delivered value for every £1,000 invested. Nine programmes simultaneously under Level 3 targeted intervention – despite the workforce nearly doubling.
The headcount itself is partly fiction. Vacancy savings have been built into DHCW’s financial plans every year since founding, hollowing out the very organisation the headcount figure claims to describe. By month six of Year 1 (2021-22), there was already a £456K vacancy underspend. In Year 2, the strategy was named in plain terms at the 29 September 2022 board meeting by the Chair, Simon Jones: “making recurrent savings through non-recurrent vacancies… is something I’ve got the scars on my back about… you just heap misery on misery every year when you do that.” The warning — three years before Level 3 escalation — was completely erased from the published minutes. The strategy continued. By Year 3, non-recurrent savings (predominantly from unfilled posts) were 54% of the total savings target. By Q1 of Year 4, 84% of the in-year savings target had been delivered through vacancies. By Year 5, the cross-meeting arc was confirmed: vacancies produced overload, overload produced burnout (65% in the July 2024 staff survey, rising to 68.9% twelve months later — the year-on-year increase itself stripped from the published minutes), burnout produced delivery failure, and delivery failure produced first Level 3 enhanced monitoring and then, in 2026, Level 4 Targeted Intervention. At the 31 July 2025 board, the Director of Finance, Claire Osmundsen-Little, said in the room — and out of the published minutes:
“The other challenging bit, and we haven’t cracked this one if I’m honest, is to finish at five, where we’re contractually finishing at five and log out. I think a lot of us are finding that more challenging, I think, and that says something about the way we work.”
The cost of the strategy is on the sickness ledger. Working days lost rose from 8,684 in 2021-22 to 15,846 in 2024-25 — an 82% increase across three years, against headcount growth of approximately 30%. Long-term sickness rose 59%. The Annual Report 2024-25 names stress and anxiety as the leading cause. The structural condition this produces is the inverse of what every credible body of digital-delivery research identifies as the prerequisite for high-performing technology delivery — see Psychological Safety for the full analytical treatment.
The 80% headcount growth is therefore an upper-bound figure. The actual filled-post number is lower, deliberately so, every year. By July 2025, only 42% of IMRP milestones were on track. This is the headcount-but-no-output paradox that Brooks’s Law describes — but in DHCW’s case it is not just an emergent property of growth. It is a financial design choice.
Beyond the formal headcount, 23 off-payroll workers operate as a shadow workforce making healthcare decisions outside the normal accountability structures. In a healthy governance system, every person making decisions that affect patients would be visible, accountable, and audited.
The hiring trap feeds directly into L5: The Vendor Dependency Spiral. Staff who lack capability cannot deliver, so work gets outsourced. Outsourced work does not build internal capability. The headcount grows, the vendor portfolio grows, and delivery stays flat.
What would a healthy alternative look like?
Governance tracks delivery per person, not headcount. Hiring targets specific skill gaps identified by independent audit. New hires are measured against delivery contribution within 12 months. If output per person declines despite growth, the hiring strategy is revised — not doubled down on.
How does the blueprint break the Hiring Trap?
Breaking the hiring trap requires two interventions acting together. Portfolio Ruthlessness stops the demand spiral: fewer programmes mean headcount can be matched to work the organisation can realistically deliver, rather than scaled to mask political pressure. Flip the Model changes what hiring is for: internal capability build, not vendor coordination overhead. Together they convert headcount from a political signal back into a delivery input.