I was recently talking with Geri Murphy, who works as a fractional Head of People across the US, UK, and Ireland, and we kept landing on the same pattern from opposite sides of the business. Companies assume they can extend what worked in one market into another, in how they sell and in how they hire, without fully understanding what made either one work in the first place.
On the marketing side, that shows up as positioning that no longer lands cleanly, or demand that doesn’t convert the way it used to. I wrote about that half separately: The Go-to-Market Assumptions That Don’t Survive a New Market.
This is the other half. On the hiring side, the drift looks different but comes from the same place.
The assumption that carries over from the first market
Expansion plans usually start from a reasonable premise: if the business works in one market, the task is to replicate it elsewhere with some adjustment. That applies to hiring as much as go-to-market.
You take what already exists and extend it. A version of the org structure, a version of the role, a version of what “senior” or “self-directed” means. What’s less visible is how much of the original version was shaped by context.
Hiring expectations, role definitions, and how quickly someone is expected to produce results are all influenced by the market the company grew up in. When those assumptions carry over unexamined, hiring starts to drift the same way marketing does, and usually at the same time.
Where the breakdown usually begins
The first signs are rarely dramatic. A new hire joins and spends more time than expected working out the role. They’re capable, but the expectations don’t map cleanly to what they’re seeing in the market day to day.
In parallel, companies start making decisions that reflect pressure rather than clarity. Roles get compressed or redefined. There’s a growing tendency to assume certain functions can be reduced or replaced, particularly with AI in the mix, without fully thinking through who’s actually responsible for operating, interpreting, and checking that work.
None of this shows up as a single point of failure. It creates friction across the system, the same way it does on the marketing side.
What this looks like once you’re in-market
An Australian company expanding into the US may find early hires spending more time sorting out expectations than building pipeline. The product resonates, but the role around it doesn’t map the way it did at home.
A UK or Irish company entering North America may discover hiring profiles don’t translate cleanly. Someone highly effective in one market can struggle in another, not from a capability gap, but because the role itself is defined differently in practice.
In some cases the shift is more structural. A company operating across the US and Canada may find geopolitical conditions shaping both hiring and sales in ways that weren’t there before. Decisions carry additional context. Messaging has to account for it. Hiring expectations shift alongside it.
Why “just hire locally” rarely fixes it
Bringing in someone from the market is often the right move. It’s also frequently treated as the whole fix.
It works best as part of a clearer system. When the underlying structure isn’t well defined, local hires end up carrying more than it looks like from the outside. They’re not just executing. They’re interpreting the role, adapting to what they’re seeing, and making calls about how the business should actually operate in that market.
That can produce strong early results, especially with the right person. It’s much harder to turn into something consistent. Over time the business accumulates multiple versions of its go-to-market and multiple interpretations of the same role, each one sensible on its own, hard to reconcile together.
What tends to hold up instead
Companies that handle this well spend time understanding how their current system actually works before extending it: not the formal version, the one that shows up in real decisions and real outcomes.
From there it becomes translation rather than replication. Which parts of a role are essential. Which depend on context. How expectations need to adapt so marketing, sales, and hiring keep reinforcing each other instead of pulling apart.
It can feel slower at the start. It tends to prevent a longer stretch of drift later.
Expansion exposes what was already unclear
International growth gets framed as an opportunity, and it is one. It’s also one of the fastest ways to find out where a company’s system was less clearly defined than it seemed.
Marketing and hiring don’t break independently. They reflect the same underlying structure, and when that structure doesn’t fit the new market, both start to show it. What worked in one place can work in another, but only if the business understands its own system well enough to adapt it.