Hiring Fast, Hiring Slow

“I sat in every interview for the first 250 employees.”, said the CEO of a very well known European success story. It’s a lesson you ignore at your peril.

Offloading final hiring decisions to heads of people or HR managers is an existential risk at the earliest stages of building a business. Why? Because at this stage every employee has an outsized influence on company performance, and crucially morale.

Every mis-hire will set you back considerably longer than it took to hire. And every employee you have to let go is forces a slow down in seizing the market opportunity.

The solution is firstly and most importantly a robust hiring process. A process that captures everything you need to ensure you get the best people. This may be different for each company but will share a lot in common with the best practices in-market. They should also seek to amplify what has worked for you previously and mitigate where you have made mis-hires. Having a system of continual tweaking of this process is vital. And remember finding the right hire starts way before the reading of CVs and resumes. Every employee is a scanner for future recruits; every cultural nuance an advert for the people you want.

And then the founder. You’re the ultimate guardian of culture. It is the founder/CEO that takes ultimate responsibilities for hires that didn’t work out because ultimately it is you that has the most skin in the game. So seeking to blame a manager for a failure of process or culture is futile because it’s you who bears a disproportionate burden of the downside.

That’s why it’s important you interview every new recruit in the early stages. It’s also why it’s important that you don’t make concessions in the name of speed or seek to overrule your better judgement for convenience. Your business is your people. Good people are the sole drivers of success.

Investing in the way you hire and the way you approach hiring is perhaps the most important investment decision you can make.

Every single hire.