Most founders aren’t bad at hiring. They’re just optimizing for the wrong thing.
I keep seeing the same hiring problem across early-stage teams.
Founders think the tradeoff is: Speed vs Quality
So they either:
- hire fast and regret it
- or hire slow and stall growth
But after working closely with a few teams, I don’t think that’s the real problem. The real issue is uncertainty.
Most hiring processes are bad at answering: “Will this person actually perform in our environment?”
So founders compensate by:
- adding more interview rounds
- delaying decisions
- over-indexing on resumes
None of that really solves the core issue.
What seems to work better:
- small real-world tasks (not theoretical ones)
- testing communication early (especially async)
- short paid trials instead of long processes
It’s less about finding perfect candidates and more about reducing bad bets early.
Do you fols also felt this or if I’m missing something.