Two-thirds or your managers love one of these people. Twenty percent love the other two, and the rest don’t like any of them.

A single bad decision can have huge negative impacts, and this general problem of hiring quality at scale can elevate or torpedo your business.

Imagine that you are running a large fast-food restaurant chain (or fitness chain or retail store). Imagine also that your business is great. What’s this mean?

It means that you are hiring lots of people and opening new stores and training new managers. Even while you keep trying to hire workers to fill those stores — and grow into your next layer of new managers.

That’s a huge strain on your HR team.

Now, imagine that business isn’t so great? What’s that mean? You have really high turnover and are hiring lots of workers (and maybe some managers) to deal with that churn. Moral is low, and your losing a ton of organizational knowledge and know-how.

And that’s a huge strain on your HR team.

Now imagine, that in either case – you have stores in dozens, or hundreds of local areas. If you are like many of the large enterprise companies we’ve spoken to, you’ve solved this strain by allowing, empowering, and/or requiring your local managers to make most, if not all, of the hiring decisions.

But, what does this really mean to you?

Your brand equity and significant company value are tied up with the very worst of all the decisions that they make.

How do you ensure that they are making uniform, consistent and legal hiring decisions?

How do you maintain a record showing that ALL of the choices your team and even franchisees are making — are consistent with traits and skills that have a clear, consistent predictive value on real employment outcomes?

What other option is there?

It’s important to empower local managers to have some real flexibility, after all they have unique insights into who they want to work with — but it’s equally important to make sure that a ‘gut feeling’ isn’t really unintentional implicit bias that can lead to a social network ‘viral’ incident or article, or even worse a lawsuit — that takes down a national brand it’s taken your company years to build.

And make no mistake, in today’s media age — one incident can erode hundreds of millions of dollars in market cap.

Sticking your head in the sand is no way to run HR.

Don’t be like this guy. In the human world of business, risks don’t go away when we ignore them.

But you can use technology to find your best hiring managers and hone in on what they do that makes them so successful. You can find and use machine learning, data science and modern assessments to learn what makes your best hires, teammates, top performers and workers — by location.

I am the co-founder of Talytica, and before this, I co-founded AND 1 — an over $200 Million basketball brand.

I know how hard it can be to find great talent.

I believe within ten years, more than 90% of all ‘industry leaders’ will be using technology to hire better.

So, a fundamental question for all VP’s of HR, COO’s, CEO’s and boards — is whether or not your organization be an early adopter, who uses technology to gain a significant and sustainable competitive advantage, or will you be playing catch-up?