Stop Block Hiring: How Waterfall Hiring Reduces Risk and Improves Go-to-Market (GTM) Teams

In today’s competitive business environment, attracting and retaining the right talent is essential to commercial success. This is most visible in go-to-market (GTM) teams where sales, marketing and customer success roles are tightly interdependent. Many organisations still hire reactively, bringing on a large number of roles in a short burst to fill immediate gaps. This practice is known as block hiring and it often introduces unexpected risk, weak alignment with strategy and operational strain across teams.

A more sustainable alternative is waterfall hiring. Borrowed from disciplined planning approaches like the waterfall methodology in project management, this approach structures recruitment into intentional phases that align with strategic priorities. In this blog we explore the problems with block hiring and explain how waterfall hiring can help businesses build GTM teams that are resilient, aligned and high performing.

What is Block Hiring and Why it Is Risky

Block hiring is a reactive recruitment practice where many roles are opened at once to rapidly increase headcount. It often comes about when a business feels pressure to scale quickly, meet aggressive targets or fill gaps created by turnover. While block hiring may seem efficient at first glance, it carries several risks.

When hiring occurs too fast, there is less time to define each role properly. This can lead to ambiguity in job expectations, overlapping responsibilities and confusion among new hires about what they are expected to achieve. With unclear roles, onboarding becomes inconsistent and new employees settle into their jobs without a strong connection to strategic priorities.

Another problem with block hiring is that it often ignores interdependencies between functions. In GTM teams, sales and marketing need to work with product, customer experience and analytics. Hiring many people without clarifying how these roles will work together can create silos and operational friction. For example, recruiting a cohort of sales professionals before defining the demand generation strategy they will support can cause duplications in effort or inefficiencies. This weakens go-to-market execution and delays impact on revenue outcomes.

A final risk is the depletion of candidate quality. When there is pressure to fill many positions quickly, hiring managers may prioritise speed over fit. This increases the likelihood of hires who struggle to meet expectations or integrate into the company culture, causing higher turnover and increased hiring costs. Without a thoughtful process, organisations usually pay far more in recruitment expenses, time spent on interviewing and onboarding inefficiencies than they anticipated.

What is Waterfall Hiring?

Waterfall hiring is a structured, phase-based approach to recruitment that aligns hiring activities with strategic GTM objectives. The term “waterfall” originates in project management terminology, where work is planned linearly, moving from one clearly defined stage to the next only after the previous step is complete. In waterfall project management, the focus is on detailed planning and minimising uncertainty before execution begins.

When applied to recruitment, waterfall hiring starts with defining the “why” a role is required. Instead of opening multiple roles simultaneously, hiring managers first gain clarity on the organisation’s strategic goals and map out how each new hire will contribute to those goals. The planning phase emphasises forecasting skills and capacity needs, taking into account both current and future requirements. This phase uses insights from workforce planning to determine not just the number of recruits required, but the precise capabilities and timing for each.

Workforce planning itself is a strategic discipline that aligns labour supply with demand by analysing the current workforce, predicting future needs and identifying gaps. It ensures that organisations have the right number of people, with the right skills, in the right roles at the right time.

After role definition and workforce planning, waterfall hiring moves into sourcing and screening, followed by structured interviews focused on both technical and cultural fit. Onboarding plans are designed up front to help new hires quickly understand expectations, performance metrics and how their work connects to GTM outcomes.

Each stage is completed in sequence, with clear criteria for progressing on to the next. This reduces uncertainty and helps ensure that talent acquisition is a deliberate, strategic process rather than a reactive scramble.

The Strategic Advantage of Waterfall Hiring

For GTM teams, the benefits of waterfall hiring become obvious when compared directly to block hiring.

First, waterfall hiring leads to stronger role clarity. When responsibilities, objectives and success metrics are defined early, candidates understand what is expected of them before they join. This strengthens hiring outcomes and accelerates time to productivity by aligning onboarding with well-defined deliverables and team expectations.

Secondly, waterfall hiring relies on workforce planning tools and insights which help forecast needs by analysing both current workforce composition and future demands. This guards against over-hiring in one area while under-investing in another. Workforce planning provides a broader view of strategic needs, enabling organisations to prioritise roles with the greatest impact on GTM results.

Thirdly, waterfall hiring promotes better integration across functional teams. Clarifying the sequence of roles means that support functions such as product marketing or customer success are not left behind or hired too late to be effective. It enhances cross-functional alignment so GTM teams can execute integrated campaigns, product launches and customer engagement plans without unnecessary friction.

Finally, waterfall hiring reduces recruitment risk. By breaking hiring into planned stages with review points, organisations can assess and adjust their strategy as needed. This is less costly and less disruptive than block hiring where misaligned decisions may only become apparent long after hires have started.