<aside> <img src="/icons/token_blue.svg" alt="/icons/token_blue.svg" width="40px" /> **You’re looking for…**a straightforward way to improve your hiring process that focuses on authentic fit rather than just skills and credentials.
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TL;DR: The team is your foundation, and getting hiring right makes all the difference. Drawing from hundreds of interviews (including some epic fails!), here are the key lessons learned about identifying the right role, understanding true motivations, and finding people who will thrive in your unique environment.
What's in it for you (WIIFY):
The team is your foundation - and hiring to build it is all the things. Scary, exciting, intimidating, tedious. Who you hire can make things wildly better or way tougher - it matters.
I honestly believe I'm really, really, really good at hiring. But, I’ve had some epic fails. While my preference is to hire entirely based on my intuition - and it is usually right(!) - I’ve learned that there are REALLY good reasons we have multiple folks interview and rubrics and processes and the list goes on and on and on.
You know that moment in an interview when everything clicks? I remember interviewing someone for a Chief of Staff role who spent the entire conversation lighting up about building and operationalizing systems. She wasn't right for the CoS position - but she became an incredible Operations leader who transformed how our organization worked. That's the magic of really understanding someone's "why" versus just checking boxes on skills and experience.
Building a great team isn't about perfect processes or foolproof frameworks - it's about finding the right humans who will thrive in your unique environment.
After plenty of both wins and lessons learned, I've found that successful hiring comes down to a few core principles that consistently make the difference between a great fit and a costly mismatch. Here's are a few of my favorite hiring lessons:
It's not always about today, hire for tomorrow.
There's always pressure to hire for what we need right here, right now. But that's just a tiny drop - it's what we need a year or two or even three that we want to build towards/focus on.
Like this one: the CEO needs someone to take on administrative work - do you want to hire an EA or Ops Manager or Chief of Staff OR take it all the way to a Deputy Director to really hold some of the work? It's easy to slot into one of these - or to write a job description that's just what feels the most painful in the moment. You do NOT want to hire a CoS if you just need expenses coded and office supplies in house just as you don't want an EA if what you really need is someone to help lead the team so the CEO can focus on where you're going versus what things are.
Is this something you’re working through right now? Start with THIS article on how to create the right role at the right level.
If there's not a clear why, nothing else matters.
I’ve learned over and over again that aligning the WHY a candidate wants the job with WHY our company needs this role is the most important thing. I love it so much that I created the “WHY Interview” - aka a wildly open-ended interview early in the process (usually just after resume review and phone screens) where I get to listen and figure out why they want this role AND if it aligns with what we want, beautiful.
Do they want to get in the weeds of the work OR lift out of it? Looking for a new challenge/to build OR to bring things they've already learned? Manage or do? All the things have a place - and is it the right fit for the org/this role?