Scale & Strategy
This is Scale & Strategy — the newsletter operators read when they’re serious about building and actually move the needle.
Today’s focus: how to hire top-tier talent without wasting time, money, or your sanity.
How Do You Hire All-Star Talent?
Building a company is hard. Hiring the right people? Even harder.
Think of hiring like cooking a Michelin-star dish. You don’t wing it. You follow a recipe—something precise, tested, and deceptively simple. Like Cacio e Pepe: pasta, pecorino romano, cracked black pepper. Three ingredients, in perfect balance.
Now imagine someone swaps out the romano for cheddar... and adds ketchup. You’ve lost the integrity of the dish. It’s incoherent, tastes awful, and has no shot at impressing anyone.
Hiring is the same. When you compromise—cut corners on clarity of role, ignore cultural alignment, or lower the bar on skill—you create a team that looks great on paper but doesn’t click in practice. You get the organizational equivalent of ketchup pasta.
Great teams don’t happen by accident. You need a clear process, strong filters, and conviction in what excellence looks like for you. Each person you bring in should be essential to the recipe—not just another warm body.
The good news? You're not alone. Below, founders and operators from early-stage startups to $500M+ businesses share how they’ve hired A+ players, scaled culture, and avoided team indigestion. Let’s get into it.
Dom Pym — Co-Founder at Up & Founder at Euphemia
Dom’s hiring philosophy has evolved across three chapters:
1. The early days:
Recruiting from within one degree of separation. No dickheads. The goal was cultural alignment and top-tier capability. They brought people in who believed what they believed, then onboarded them into a new way of working.
2. The growth phase (15 → 100):
Focus shifted to diversity—of background, thought, skill set. The company needed to reflect its fast-growing customer base. They brought in people from different walks of life, with different experiences, to strengthen problem-solving across the board.
3. Scaling up:
Now with a 160+ team and in-house recruiters, hiring is formalized. Team leads collaborate with the people team to own the process. They run interviews in-office (even for hybrid roles) to pressure-test culture fit. It’s deliberate and layered.
Whether it’s customer support or engineering, the rigor flexes to match the role. But across the board, one thing stays constant: cultural fit trumps everything else. Skills can be trained. Values can’t.
John Howard — Founder at Slingshot
Slingshot has scaled through one channel: trusted introductions.
John’s approach is simple: “The network is everything.” Every team member has come via referral. No outbound recruiting yet.
Each new hire starts as a contractor. It’s a try-before-you-buy approach that filters for both performance and team chemistry. If it clicks, they go full-time. It’s worked: only one full-time person has left since 2020—and they left to work with foster families, not another startup.
Elicia McDonald — Partner at Airtree
At Airtree, hiring is about access and intentionality.
They don’t always have open roles, but when they do, they cast a wide net—social posts, newsletters, referrals, job boards, and direct outreach.
On the investment team, the hiring process includes:
- A screening call
- Interviews
- A hybrid case study (take-home + live)
- Cultural interviews with multiple team members
The goal: attract a diverse pool and evaluate candidates holistically—thinking, behavior, and values.
Jamie Turner — CEO at Convex
Jamie relies heavily on referrals to start the process—it saves time and improves hit rates. But once candidates are in the pipeline, Convex runs a uniquely startup-specific playbook.
Key tactics:
- Simulate a real workday in interviews. Engineers collaborate on real problems with future teammates.
- Gauge how candidates handle ambiguity. In startups, clarity is a luxury. The best hires thrive in the grey, not just execute in the known.
Bottom line: skills matter, but attitude toward uncertainty is often the deciding factor.
Scott Leese — Fractional CRO & GTM Advisor
Scott works with dozens of early-stage companies and sees one common thread among high-performing sales orgs: they give a shit.
It starts with the product. You can’t build a winning sales culture around a “nice-to-have.” Your product has to solve real pain.
Then it’s about support—career paths, onboarding, coaching, mentorship. One-on-ones aren’t just for pipeline reviews; they’re for real conversations. “How’s your health? What are you saving for? How can I help?”
This level of care creates gravity. People talk. The right candidates come to you. And if they don’t? You’ve still built a place worth staying in—or leaving well from.
Mac Reddin — Co-Founder & CEO at Commsor
Mac’s mantra: Hire intentionally. Not slowly.
The first question isn’t “Who should we hire?” It’s “Do we actually need to hire at all?” Many teams over-hire as a crutch for deeper issues.
Once the need is clear, Mac moves fast.
Two key lessons guide his process:
- Even world-class hiring systems get it wrong ~25% of the time.
- If it’s not a “hell yes,” it’s a “no.”
Settling on a “good enough” candidate has always come back to bite him.
A Serious Note on Hiring
It would be crazy not to say this part out loud: I run a hiring company.
If you’re growing a global team—from product and engineering to ops and GTM—we’re built to help. We do end-to-end recruiting with a deep focus on fit, speed, and long-term success.
Let’s talk. You can reach out [here].
Whether you're making your first hire or your hundredth, the rules stay the same: clarity, intentionality, and no ketchup pasta.
Now, back to work. You’ve got a team to build.
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