I once interviewed, negotiated and hired six people in the span of 48 hours.
We were growing fast, and here is what it felt like from the inside: the building was raging on fire, we were inside it, there was no water, and we needed anyone with a pulse and a bucket who was willing to help put it out. Every empty seat was a fire, so I hired like a firefighter.
You can guess how those six worked out. The pain was greater than the logic, and pain will make you focus on the urgent instead of the important every single time, and feel good about it while you do.
Here’s what that expensive lesson taught me: a great company doesn’t happen by accident, and neither does a great team. Consider the math that should have slowed me down. I dated my wife for almost four years before I married her. I spend more waking hours with the people I hire than I do with her. I gave those six hires a combined 48 hours.
The 5-3-2-1 process
The fix is a process with gates, because gates are what stand between you and your own urgency.
5. Screen to five. Write the job description to reflect your values, not just the skills. Screen resumes hard; errors count, because this is the candidate’s best work. Five names get phone calls.
3. Call down to three. The phone interview answers two questions: basic competence, and would anyone here want to sit next to this person for a decade? Likability isn’t shallow. It’s a proxy for a hundred future collaborations.
2. Interview down to two. In person. Relatability and competence, plus an assessment instrument to check what interviews can’t see. The second round includes the people they’d actually work with, including potential direct reports. Your team sees things you don’t, and inviting them makes the hire theirs too.
1. One gate before the offer. Leadership signs off on cultural fit. Not a rubber stamp: a genuine last look by whoever guards the culture, empowered to say no even when the seat is on fire.
The rule underneath the process
Every gate exists to slow you down at the exact moment your pain is screaming to speed up. That’s the whole design. When the building is burning, process is what stops you from hiring the smoke.
The hire that clears every skills bar and still corrodes the team a year later has a name: a culture casualty. Gate 1 exists because that hire always looked fine at gate 5.
This matters most on your first real leadership team, where every hire is load-bearing and every mistake compounds. If you are weighing a promotion against an outside hire, the fuller version of the argument is in the guide on hiring a leadership team.
Promote or hire, take the time. The seat being empty for six more weeks costs less than the wrong person holding it for two years.