Capability 7 · Company System
Hire & Raise the Talent Bar
A serious hire deserves a serious process — work out what the organisation needs, select with evidence, onboard deliberately, and keep the evaluation rhythm running so the bar rises over time.
Founders say
“He interviewed brilliantly — everyone loved him. Six months later we're having the conversation I should have seen coming before he even started.”
Where you are today
- Job descriptions get copied from bigger companies, describing someone else's need — or last year's.
- Candidates are ranked on gut feel and interview charm, and nobody asks how the hire could go wrong.
- Onboarding is a laptop and good luck; the first real evaluation happens when something breaks.
Where you’re headed
- Every role starts from what the organisation actually needs — and survives the question of whether the existing team could do it with better tools.
- Candidates are ranked on performance × culture, and every hire gets a premortem before day one.
- New hires run on a 30-60-90 with transparent checkpoints — and there's a clear, humane bar for staying.
Why this matters
Hiring is the highest-stakes recurring decision you make, and most founders run it backwards: they start from a job description instead of from the organisation. The flow that works starts one level up — what does the company actually need right now, and does this role at this seniority still describe it? Then rank every candidate on the two axes that matter, performance and culture, instead of interview charm. And do the one thing almost nobody does: run a premortem on the hire before they start. "If this were to go wrong, how would it go wrong?" — asked while it's still cheap to fix. The bar keeps rising after the offer, too: onboarding with transparent evaluation, and the honesty to act when someone's a six out of ten.
What this means
- Work out what the organisation really needs before writing the job description — including whether AI and the existing team could close the gap without a hire.
- Rank candidates on performance × culture, and pressure-test the hire with a premortem before day one.
- Onboard with a 30-60-90 plan and transparent early evaluations — low early scores are fine; trajectory matters.
- Keep the bar rising: run performance × culture as a regular talent rhythm, with the feedback and support to improve.
What good looks like
- The org need decides the role: job description and seniority are checked against what the company needs for the next two years — and against whether AI plus the existing team could close the gap instead.
- Candidates are ranked on performance × culture, and every serious hire gets a premortem before they start.
- Onboarding runs on a 30-60-90 plan with evaluation checkpoints that are transparent from day one — a low early score is fine; not knowing where they stand is not.
Where founders get it wrong
- Hiring from a copied job description — the role describes another company's org, or the company you were a year ago.
- Skipping the premortem. You'd stress-test a €50k marketing spend, then make a €150k hiring decision on two good conversations.
- Letting a six-out-of-ten linger: no early checkpoints, months of avoidance, then an exit that shocks everyone — slowest and cruellest for the person themselves.
The hiring flow
Start from the organisation
What does the company actually need to reach the next milestone? Only then write — or rewrite — the job description and seniority level against that answer.
Challenge the hire itself
Could the existing team do this with better tools? In the AI era, headcount is the last resort, not the default — investors read the efficiency curve too.
Rank on performance × culture
Score every candidate on both axes. Culture isn't "would I have a beer with them" — it's your values, screened for explicitly.
Premortem before they start
Imagine the hire failed. How? Ranked by likelihood, the list tells you what to de-risk in the first month.
“"He wasn't able to turn his network into leads." "His lack of people-management experience meant the team malfunctioned."”
Onboard on a 30-60-90
Transparent checkpoints from day one. A low early score is expected — they're new. The point is that both of you always know where they stand.
For senior hires, run a real process
The more senior the role, the more the process should look like the Senior Hire Process — a four-phase interview loop ending in a strategy task presented to the C-level. You won't need all of it for every role; it's the ceiling you strip back from, not a floor you build up to.
The bar for staying
Raising the talent bar doesn't stop at the offer. The standard, borrowed from Derek Sivers: if it's not a hell yeah, it's a no. By the time you're seriously debating whether someone should stay, the Accountability Dial should already have been running — numbers, dates, real chances to turn it around. And when the answer is still no, use the playbook: the decision stated cleanly, the reasons concrete, dignity intact.
The talent bar is a ratchet. Every hire either raises the average or lowers it — and the team always knows which one just happened, long before you admit it to yourself.
What you can do right now
- Ask the org-need question. "What does the organisation actually need — and does this job description still describe it?" Check the seniority against the next two years, not the next quarter.
- Rank your live pipeline on the grid. Performance on one axis, culture on the other. If two finalists swap places when you score them properly, the gut feel was noise. Performance × Culture Grid →
- Premortem your next hire. Before they start: "If this were to go wrong, how would it go wrong?" List the ways, rank by likelihood, and mitigate the top two while it's cheap. Premortem →
- Write the 30-60-90 before day one. What good looks like at each checkpoint, evaluated transparently. New hires want to know the bar — hiding it protects nobody. 30-60-90 Plan →
The toolkit
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