The Hiring Bar Has to Move, and Nobody Tells You When

A business I know had thirty-one people and a hiring bar nobody had ever thought to raise. Bright, young, cheap, unformed, willing to do anything. It had worked eleven times.

The twelfth hire was for a role that needed somebody who had built a finance function through an audit before. They hired bright, young, cheap and willing, because that is what they knew how to interview for. Fourteen months later they had a set of accounts nobody trusted and a well-liked thirty-year-old who had been set up to fail.

Nobody had done anything wrong. The profile that built the company had simply expired, and no letter arrives to tell you.

This is the least discussed transition in company building. The kind of person you should be hiring changes at least twice on the way from ten people to two hundred, and the change is invisible from inside because it is masked by loyalty to the people who got you here, the same loyalty that keeps a founder approving decisions a senior hire should already own.

01What actually changes when the company gets bigger?

The nature of the problem changes, from doing the work to designing how the work gets done.

When I interviewed Girish Mathrubootham, the founder of Freshworks, he was clear that the early profile was a compromise, not a philosophy. "In our early days in India, we were a 'learning-by-doing' company. We couldn't find people who had scaled a company to hundreds of millions in revenue. We did the next best thing: hiring bright, young minds eager to learn."

That is a description of a constraint, not a creed. What matters is what he said about the point where it stopped serving: "As we scaled up and prepared to go public, we realized that 'learning by doing' wouldn't always cut it. We needed to bring in individuals with expertise and experience, those who had 'been there, done that.'"

He is not saying the early people were wrong. He is saying the company arrived at a class of problem where the cost of learning in public exceeded the cost of buying experience. Public-company reporting is one. So is a first international entity, a first real security incident, a first recall.

The tell is not a bad hire. It is a run of respectable hires who never quite take anything off you.

02Why do founders hire their own comfort?

Because in the early days, hiring people you like is a genuinely good heuristic, and nobody tells you when it stops being one.

Tony Hsieh, who built Zappos and sold it to Amazon for around $1.2bn, described his early filter to me with disarming candour: "In the early days... the criteria was, 'is this someone that I would choose to go grab a drink with... even if we weren't forced to work together?' And if the answer was no, then we just wouldn't hire them."

At twenty people that test does real work. It screens for people who will tolerate ambiguity and argue honestly. At two hundred it produces a company that is pleasant to run and progressively worse at its job, because a founder's social range is narrower than the company's problem range.

There is a subtler version of it: hiring whoever everybody else wants. Judd Kessler, the Wharton economist and market designer, put it to me plainly: "It's natural, by the way, for there to be a pile-on: everyone going after the same people, creating correlated preferences. You might want to take a step back and ask, am I pursuing this person just because everyone else is?"

That is the fashionable failure: you pay a premium for the consensus candidate while the person who would have solved your problem sits two rungs down the market, available.

Most founders do not have a hiring problem. They have a specification problem, and hiring is where it becomes visible.

03Does raising the bar mean hiring for pedigree?

No, and conflating the two is how the correction goes wrong.

Ben Francis, who founded Gymshark in a garage in Bromsgrove and built it into a business valued at over £1bn, made the distinction well: "We don't necessarily hire the best CV, we hire the right CV. If someone is 10/10 skills-fit, but doesn't seem interested in our long-term vision? I'd rather have the 8/10 candidate who's passionate about where we're going."

A raised bar is not a demand for bigger logos. It is a demand for evidence that somebody has met your problem before and survived it. The useful question in a senior interview is rarely what did you run; it is what did you inherit, what broke, and what did you do about it.

Mitch Kapor, who founded Lotus and now invests through Kapor Capital, screens on something adjacent that I think is underrated: "We're very interested in where somebody started in life, and what hurdles and barriers they have already overcome in their journey, and how that grit has got them to where they are now. That's an indicator of resilience, persistence, and many other character traits that are significant in terms of entrepreneurial success."

Distance travelled is harder to fake than an employer's name, and it correlates with what you actually need from a senior hire in a growing business: the capacity to keep functioning while the ground moves.

04How do you take the noise out of the decision?

By structuring the process, not by trying to become a better judge of people.

When I interviewed Daniel Kahneman and Cass Sunstein about their work on noise, Kahneman was blunt about where the gains are: "We know- for example- that structured interview procedures lead to better hiring and that structuring is actually a major element of decision hygiene."

Sunstein described the organisational symptom precisely: "You may have a company where someone in hiring says, 'bring everyone in, I think they're great' and you end up with a company full of people who shouldn't be there, the opposite... denies employment opportunities to people who really should be there."

The translation is unglamorous and cheap. Agree the four or five dimensions the role requires before meeting anybody, ask every candidate the same questions, and have interviewers score independently and submit before the debrief. Most of the disagreement in a hiring debrief is not insight, it is variability, and letting the most confident voice speak first destroys whatever the other interviewers were carrying.

05Three ways the bar moves without anyone noticing

Three things, and not one of them is about the candidate.

The founder hires a version of themselves at the previous stage. This is the commonest and the hardest to see, because the hire feels right in the room. The test is whether the person is qualified for the job you will have in eighteen months, not the one you have this quarter.

The bar rises silently and the existing team finds out by inference. Nothing corrodes a company faster than early employees working out from the calibre of new arrivals that the standard has changed and nobody told them. The change is defensible. The concealment is not.

A senior hire is imported without authority. A £180,000 operator is hired to fix a function, and every decision they make is quietly reversed by the founder who has always made those decisions. They leave within a year, and the conclusion drawn is that senior people do not work here, when the actual fault is a decision right that was never designed and handed over.

06When the problem is the manager, not the bar

The honest objection is that raising the bar is often a euphemism for churning loyal people to cover a founder's failure to manage. That objection is right more often than founders admit.

If the last three senior hires all failed, the problem is you. If nobody has ever been told clearly what good looks like, a higher bar will not fix an absence of management. And if every hire is still a bet on general capability rather than specific experience, the eager generalist remains the correct answer, and this advice is for companies four times your size.

There is also a pace argument. When I interviewed Professor Alex Hill, whose research examines organisations that have endured for more than a century, he cited a mantra I have never forgotten: "Hewlett Packard, at its inception, lived by the mantra, 'Never grow faster than you can attract great people.'" The corollary is that if you cannot hire to the standard the next stage requires, the answer may be to grow more slowly rather than to hire below it.

The exception is speed of correction. Victor Vescovo, the explorer and private equity co-founder who has summited Everest and dived to the deepest point in the ocean, was unsentimental with me about team fit: "If someone is not working out on the team, they must be replaced very quickly... 90% of the time, development programmes don't work, and you know very quickly whether someone is working out or not." That is too absolute for most businesses. It is also true that most founders wait nine months longer than they should, and know it.

07What breaks trust isn't the standard

Would the last person you hired clear the bar you are about to set for the next one? Take the next role you are about to open, write down the four things it genuinely requires before you meet a single candidate, and find out.

Then tell your existing team that the bar is moving, and why. The people who built the company are not the enemy of this change; they are usually the first to have noticed. What breaks trust is not a higher standard, it is discovering one that arrived unannounced.