Job posts, interviews, offers, onboarding — no HR team needed.
The most expensive hiring mistake a founder can make is hiring a Head of Sales too early or hiring the wrong one. I’ve seen it happen at every stage. A Series A founder finally has the budget to bring on a sales leader, hires someone impressive from a large company, and watches them fail within … Read more
Most performance review systems fail before anyone fills them in. They’re too long. Too generic. Too disconnected from how people actually work. They ask employees to rate themselves on “communication” and “teamwork” using a 1-5 scale that means nothing because nobody defined what a 3 looks like. I’ve seen this at every stage of startup. … Read more
Most Series A companies make the same mistake with their first VP of People hire. They wait until something breaks — a bad hire that costs six months, a culture problem that surfaces in an all-hands, a departing engineer who cites “poor management” in their exit interview. Then they panic-hire a People leader and expect … Read more
I’ve made three genuinely bad hires. Not “didn’t work out” bad — properly bad. The kind where you spend 3 months managing a situation that should never have existed. Each one was different. Each one was avoidable. And looking back, each one had red flags I either didn’t see or chose to ignore. Here’s what … Read more
My first remote hire almost quit in week 2. Not because the role was wrong. Not because the pay was wrong. Because I had no onboarding plan. I sent them a laptop, added them to Slack, and pointed them at a Notion doc that hadn’t been updated in 4 months. By day 10 they were … Read more
I used to copy job descriptions from company careers pages I admired. Big mistake. Those companies are optimising for volume — thousands of applicants, large HR teams to filter them, and the luxury of time. You have none of those things. When you write a job post like a Fortune 500, you get Fortune 500 … Read more
For eight months, I couldn’t find good people. I was running an HR SaaS startup — which, yes, is deeply embarrassing given what we do. We help companies hire smarter. And there I was, drowning in mediocre applicants, ghosting candidates by accident, and spending Sunday evenings rewriting the same job description for the fourth time. … Read more