Hiring is a skill that most teams have never built.

That's not a knock. You built a team, maybe even a business (well done) but it didn’t come with a hiring playbook on the way up.

Is this you?

You're probably somewhere between twenty and two hundred people. Big enough that a bad hire actually hurts. Not big enough to have somebody whose entire job is hiring — so it lands on an HR generalist already buried in benefits and payroll, or on the manager who needed the seat filled last month.

And the roles you're stuck on aren't the easy ones. They're the ones where the title is doing work it was never built for. You're hiring an "account manager," but what you actually need is somebody who can run projects, hold a budget, and keep two difficult clients from walking — and the last person who did it invented the job as they went, then left without writing any of it down.

Or the job description is a copy of the last one, which was a copy of something before that, and nobody currently at the company wrote a word of it.

Usually you've run the search twice and can't say exactly what went sideways either time.

Who we're not for

If you need forty warehouse associates and there are a hundred qualified people within ten miles, that's a solved problem. A staffing firm will do it faster and cheaper than we will. We'd rather tell you that now.

What We Actually do

Two things go wrong. Almost everybody only fixes the second one.

The first is that nobody ever worked out what this person is really for. The second is that the process for finding them is a couple of conversations and a gut feeling.

We work on both, in that order, because fixing the second one without the first just gets you to the wrong person faster.

1. It starts with a call

What is this job, actually? Not the posting — the job. What does this person own, what does the first ninety days look like, what does the market pay for it, and what breaks if you get it wrong. We run a role market analysis and hand you back a real definition. Most folks read it and realize they've been hiring for two different jobs at once.

2. We work backwards

Most searches start with a job description and go hunting for somebody who matches it. We go the other direction.

Real discovery is a conversation about what you're actually trying to get done — the thing sitting behind the opening. Why now. What happens to the business if this seat is still empty next quarter. What broke the last two times you tried. Who this person has to work with, and which of those relationships is the hard one.

Once we know what has to get accomplished, we can work out what has to get done. Only then what kind of person does that.

That order matters. Start at the job description and you inherit every assumption baked into it, usually by somebody who's already gone. This is the unglamorous part, and it's where most searches were lost before anybody opened a resume.

3. Then we go get them

Four touchpoints, built out of more than two thousand hires. A screen, a panel, a work demo, and the close.

The work demo is the one people remember. At some point your best candidate ends up in deep water on a real problem out of your business — one nobody's solved yet — because talking about work and doing work turn out to be pretty different skills.

We're not checking whether somebody interviews well. We're watching how they operate when they don't know the answer.

4. And then we get out

Every engagement should end.

So the handoff is built in from the start. We solve the hard one, we train whoever's going to own it after us, and when you're ready to put a real talent person on payroll, we'll run that search too — which is, conveniently, the one search we know better than anybody.

What this takes from you

Worth being straight about it.

You pay before there's a hire, because the work starts before there's a hire. And we're going to need hours out of you and out of whoever this person would report to. Not a kickoff call and then silence — real time in the discovery, real time in the debriefs.

That's a lot to ask, and it's on purpose. If the pain isn't big enough to justify spending money and time to finally get this right, then it isn't big enough to hire us for — and that's a fine answer. Some of the best calls we have end with us telling somebody what to go fix themselves first..

A few things people ask

  • They get paid when somebody starts, and they're usually racing two other firms for the same role. So speed wins. We get paid for the engagement, which is why we can spend the first week asking questions instead of firing resumes at you.

  • Because the work starts before we've found anybody. Most of what makes this work happens before a single resume shows up. If we only got paid on placement, we'd have to skip that part — same as everybody else.

  • No, and honestly that's usually a misread of the problem. Most of the time they're good and they're buried. We either take the weight off or teach them the process and get out of the way.

  • Honestly, a lot of companies should. If you've got somebody internal with the time and the discipline to run a real process, you don't need us — and we'll tell you that on the call. We'd rather send you off with something useful than sell you an engagement you didn't need.