The Big Hire and the Little Hire

Definition

The Big Hire is the moment a customer decides to buy or adopt a product; the Little Hire is every subsequent moment the customer chooses to actually use it instead of an alternative. Companies default to measuring the Big Hire because it produces clean transactional data, but the book insists that "only a consistent series of Little Hires can confirm" that a product has really solved a customer's job — a purchase can happen for reasons (a promotion, a gift, social pressure) that have nothing to do with the job the product ends up doing, or failing to do, afterward.

In the Book

Chapter 5's takeaways state the mechanism directly: "seemingly objective data about customer behavior is often misleading, as it focuses exclusively on the Big Hire (when the customer actually buys a product) and neglects the Little Hire (when the customer actually uses it)." The chapter pairs this with a second, related insight — that before a customer hires anything new, "you have to understand what he'll need to fire in order to hire yours," because adopting a new solution always displaces something else in the customer's life, even if that something is doing nothing (a gap, a workaround, or inaction itself). The "Questions for Leaders" that close the chapter push readers to produce direct evidence of both hires: "Do you have evidence that your customers make the Little Hire and the Big Hire?" and to trace the full story from "a circumstance of struggle, to firing their current solution, and ultimately hiring yours."

Why It Matters

Sales and signup numbers are Big Hire metrics, and optimizing for them alone can reward products that get bought once and then abandoned, ignored, or used for the wrong reason — a gap that revenue dashboards will not show until churn arrives much later. Separating the two hires forces a company to instrument ongoing use, not just conversion, and to ask what the customer is firing to make room for the new solution, which is often the harder question to answer honestly.