From Capabilities to Culture: Redefining the Hiring Process

Building a company is all about human capital. People create products and sell them to other…people. Even in the age of AI, people sit at the core of every company, yet hiring excellent talent is the single most challenging element of a business to do well consistently. It’s also critical to building a company at every stage. The weight of human capital is magnified dramatically in the earliest stages, where the right hire can be the difference between a business accelerating dramatically and a company languishing as it wrestles with a bad fit.

So, how do you get it right? We chatted with three exceptional leaders who have demonstrated a sustained ability to surround themselves (and their teams) with great talent. Each conversation could have yielded a novel, but we have distilled our learnings into three critical and, perhaps, non-obvious principles that you need to consider before, during, and after a hiring process.

When hiring, we often ask ourselves, “What kind of person do I need?” When you ask this question, you have already bounded your potential outcomes. You have created the focus on hiring someone when, in fact, there might be other ways to solve your needs. If you instead ask, “What capabilities do I need?” you have framed the question in a much broader way that opens you up to different options.

There have never been more and better options to leverage capabilities as a service. Whether it’s virtual assistants, HR-as-a-service, outsourced finance, or any number of different services, you can find exceptional help in many different ways that are not hiring a W2 or even a 1099. As Zapier’s Chief People Officer Brandon Sammut shares, Zapier has expanded the traditional “buy vs. build” framework to include a few more Bs. They have four: Buy, Build, Borrow, and Bot. In the context of hiring, they can be roughly translated to mean:

When you consider this framework before diving headlong into hiring, you realize there are many more tools in your toolbelt than just a hammer (e.g., building). This will enable you to hire more methodically and, hopefully, more successfully.

A common trap companies fall into is hiring for lack of weakness. Doug Scott, Co-Founder and CEO of Ethic.com, points out that this manifests during a process when discussing a candidate. There are no objections around the table, and the candidate is passed to the next phase of the process because they don’t have any identifiable, obvious weaknesses. They are likable, solid, and uncontroversial. This may not be a problem on the surface, but you are not looking for solid across the board, you are looking for exceptional in the circle of competence that encompasses the capability you need.

If you have followed Brandon’s advice and have a clear outline of what capabilities you’re looking for, you need to index off people who spike in those categories. It’s important to know what you need, but equally important to know what you do not care about. You are looking for A+ players in specific skills and should not care if they grade low in others. So, what do you need someone to be an A+ in?

An extension of this is the trap of the trophy search. This is where you create a laundry list of everything you want in a candidate. Pretty soon, you are looking for a unicorn that does not exist. Be very specific about the capabilities that matter for this role, and find that person. Do not try to overfit all the company’s problems in a single role. Be clear, specific, and clinical about your needs. Then, go find someone who excels in this area, even if they fall short in others that are not relevant.

A significant part of hiring well is what comes after making your decision and adding a new person to the team. As Mark Wilkins, a former Officer in the US Army and Managing Director at UBS, shared, “You always have to be developing the people you hire.” You can’t hire someone and then delegate their development to someone else, especially in the early days of a company. Only one person (or set of people) can lead the organization: the founder(s).

Equally importantly, you cannot expect perfection. In fact, perfection should be a red flag. Everyone makes mistakes, especially those who are pushing boundaries. You need to underwrite mistakes with new hires. If they are not failing here and there, then they are likely not pushing the boundaries aggressively enough. Yes, you need to know the difference between rubber balls and crystal balls, but some balls will be dropped. And when they are, be intentional about using those moments to help them develop. Mark likes to take the approach of being hard but nurturing. These moments will be an interesting litmus test. Exceptional talent will respond well (assuming good leadership), and others will buckle.

These principles boil down to a straightforward approach to hiring:

It seems simple, but in the chaos of building a company, people can get lost in an endless list of to-dos. However, keeping these top of mind will dramatically improve your approach to hiring, which will have significant knock-on effects on your business.