15 Lessons About Finding and Hiring the Right People

I consider the biggest lesson in hiring to be that a linear resume is not the same thing as readiness for the job. In behavioral health, employers can overlook strong candidates when they search only for people who have already held an identical title in an identical setting. Someone from hospitality, education, retail, or security may bring transferable skills in areas such as communication, de-escalation, maintaining boundaries, documentation, or staying composed when circumstances change.

I recommend starting with the position’s nonnegotiable requirements, including any required license, training, and scope, and then separating those from skills that can be developed after hire. From there, ask candidates to connect prior responsibilities to the actual demands of the position. The useful question is not simply, “Have you done this exact job before?” It is, “What job-related evidence shows you can perform this work responsibly and continue developing?”

That approach broadens the candidate pool without lowering standards. It also prevents employers from confusing familiarity with fit. The right hire may not have the most predictable career path, but should demonstrate reliable follow-through, appropriate professional boundaries, and a clear understanding of the work.

The biggest lesson we’ve learned is that hiring the right person starts with understanding the job, not the candidate.

It’s easy to be impressed by someone with a great resume, relevant experience, or a strong interview. But none of those things necessarily mean they’ll perform well in your specific role and organization.

Before we hire, we want to understand what success in that job actually requires. What competencies does this person need? How do they need to think, communicate, solve problems, and work with others? Once that’s clear, you can evaluate candidates against the requirements of the job rather than relying heavily on instinct or whether you simply liked someone in an interview.

Our approach at Hiring Indicators is informed by more than 50 years of workplace performance data, and one lesson continues to stand out: when there’s a strong match between the person and the job, you’re much more likely to see better performance, engagement, and retention.

It’s a simple lesson, but an important one: define what you’re looking for before you start looking for someone to fill the seat.

The biggest lesson for us has been how much of a difference it makes to a business when you’re intentional about who you hire. Hire A-players at the highest seniority your budget allows, people with experience who have built things before and take ownership of the results, because they’re the people who drive growth.

We’ve hired that way on our own team since we started Hire With Near in 2021, and it’s a big reason we ranked No. 118 on the 2026 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America. It’s also what we help our clients do, and once they see what those hires deliver, a lot of them come back to hire more.

Sometimes it takes longer to find that person, but one standout hire can do more than two or three average ones. McKinsey research found top performers are 400% more productive than average ones, and 800% more productive in complex roles like management and software development. We’ve seen that to be true with our own hires and with the placements we make.

Decide what the hire has to protect before you compare anyone.

In production, the word “crew” covers very different needs. Sometimes the priority is cost. Sometimes it’s who answers when the schedule bends at 6 a.m. On multi-city work, it’s whether someone’s judgment holds up in a market we have never shot in: the same framing habits, the same audio standards, the same idea of what “done” means when an executive’s window shrinks from an hour to twenty minutes.

I’ve watched companies save money on paper and spend it twice in recovery. A low quote that assumed a short day. A crew that looked strong in a reel and went quiet when the brief was fuzzy. A local hire who nailed the first market and read the brand standards differently in the second. None of that shows up on a rate card.

When we vet local crews across different US markets, we are looking for familiar judgment. Different people, same clarity about what good looks like and who decides when something drifts. We write those requirements down before anyone books a flight.

It makes hiring slower at the start. That is still cheaper than finding out on set what you actually hired.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that a good interview tells you very little. In my experience, plenty of people talk well about the work and then struggle to do it.

So we stopped relying on conversation alone and started giving finalists a short real task before any offer. A few years ago we nearly hired someone who interviewed brilliantly, so I asked him to outline how he’d handle a messy customer request. His answer skipped the customer’s actual problem, and the next candidate’s did not, so we hired her.

Speaking of that, the cost of a wrong hire hits us harder than most.

We’re bootstrapped with no investors, so a slow or wrong hire eats cash we can’t replace. Here’s the routine I’d copy. Pick one real problem from your own inbox and strip out the private details. Give it to each finalist with a one-hour limit and say, “Tell me what you’d do first and why.” Then ask, “What would you need to know before you sent this to the customer?” Good candidates ask questions, and weak ones rush to an answer. Score every finalist on the same three points: did they find the customer’s real problem, did they ask for missing facts, and could they explain their choices plainly.

After 20 years of building teams around e-commerce businesses and helping thousands of entrepreneurs do the same, my biggest hiring lesson is blunt. I hire for curiosity and purpose-alignment first, skills second. Skills can be taught. When I have hired a person who wants to learn and who cares about the mission, they have outperformed the technically perfect candidate who was just looking for a paycheck.

I screen for lifelong learners by asking candidates to walk me through something they taught themselves in the last year, unprompted by any job requirement. The ones who light up and get specific about a rabbit hole they went down are the ones who adapt when my business changes direction, which it always does.

The piece that took me longer to act on was building a diverse pipeline for every role, even when I felt pressure to fill a seat fast. Bringing in people with different backgrounds and perspectives made my teams sharper and gave me a bench of future leaders I could promote from within. The times I rushed to fill a role with someone who looked and thought like everyone already on the team cost me more than the times I waited an extra few weeks for the right person.

When we interviewed PHP developers, I noticed that some candidates who struggled to give quick answers could still explain how they would approach a problem. That stayed with me. I didn’t want to judge someone’s ability based only on how confidently they spoke in an interview. I wanted to understand how they think when they face a problem they haven’t seen before. I also learned not to treat every gap in a candidate’s knowledge as a dealbreaker. Nobody knows everything, and technologies can be learned on the job. I pay attention to whether someone can explain their reasoning, listen to feedback, and work through an unfamiliar issue without pretending to know the answer. That gives me a more useful picture of how they might fit into a development team than a polished interview performance alone.

The most important thing that we have learnt is that choosing the right candidate is not only about finding the required skills and experience but also about understanding how the person thinks and interacts with others. It is essential for a candidate to fit into the team and to be flexible enough to deal with changes and new challenges. We have seen that the most useful way to get more information is to conduct structured interviews and tests which will help us see more than we would be able to see using the CV or our first impression only.

The biggest lesson is that the right hire depends on a two-way match between the person and the work environment. In behavioral healthcare, employee experience and client care can be closely connected, so it is important to be realistic about both the demands of the role and the support available to employees.

I recommend giving candidates a realistic, specific picture of the position. Explain the daily responsibilities, pace, schedule, team structure, and what success should look like during the first several months. Candidates should also have enough time to ask detailed questions about leadership, collaboration, available support, and the demands of the role. That conversation helps both sides determine whether expectations align before an offer is accepted.

This is especially important in behavioral healthcare, where the work can be demanding and requires sustained engagement with colleagues and clients. A candidate may be highly capable but still need an environment different from the one available. Hiring becomes more effective when the employer clearly communicates what the job requires and listens carefully to the candidate’s questions and preferences about job-related support, communication, workload, and working conditions.

The most critical lesson from scaling global engineering teams is that technical talent is a commodity, whereas delivery discipline is a genuine competitive advantage. The most costly hiring mistakes occur when organizations prioritize a candidate’s mastery of a specific language over their understanding of how that code creates business value. We shifted our focus from simply finding skilled engineers to identifying professionals who possess an owner mindset-individuals who can navigate the tension between technical perfection and operational necessity. A developer who writes elegant code but fails to communicate a project delay or ignores the financial implications of a technical choice is ultimately a liability. Our hiring process now emphasizes practical problem-solving, requiring candidates to prove they can align engineering investments with actual outcomes. We look for people who view software development through the lens of sustainable returns rather than temporary task completion. You must never confuse activity with progress during recruitment. While a high volume of hires might look like growth, if those individuals lack the discipline to manage risk and maintain trust, the organization is merely accumulating technical and cultural debt. The most successful hires are those who understand that technology is a tool for problem-solving, and that their value is measured solely by the reliability of the solutions they deliver.

The first brief is a hypothesis. Every search starts with written criteria taken from the job description and our calls with the client, and our AI agents score every relevant public profile against them, with a written reason for each score. But the real criteria only show up when the client reacts to the first real candidates. So we rewrite the criteria with that feedback and score everyone again. Less than 3% of the profiles we analyse reach a shortlist, and a partner interviews every one of them before the client sees a name.

Early on in hiring we made some mistakes. We hired in a hurry and thought that since these people’s resumes looked good, we were okay. About 33% quit their positions within 6 months. And not one warned us that things were falling behind. Our clients learned about those situations first.

Now any final candidate must complete a small 1 week project with our company before hiring, and it is paid of course. This project is on purpose a little messy and does not contain all of the details. People can shine in an interview, talking polished, but throw a fuzzy situation at them and some shine, and others clam up.

Since implementing this process early quits have been cut about 50% within the first year. A bad hire can cost your company far more than a small project. I’ll be sloppy and honest over polished any day.

The biggest lesson: you can’t hire well if hiring is an event. In the trades, healthcare, and manufacturing, there is no pool of qualified people sitting idle waiting on your job posting. Anyone good is already employed. So if you only start recruiting when a seat opens, you’ve already lost — you’re hiring under pressure, and pressure makes you hire the first warm body who passes a background check.

We built Trinity Talent Group on the opposite premise: recruit continuously, and talk to people you don’t technically need yet. Over three years we placed more than 1,000 technicians and trades workers across 48 states, and the clearest pattern was this — the organizations that stayed full were the ones talking to candidates every week whether or not they had an opening.

That’s what makes “hire slow, fire fast” actually possible. Most leaders have it backwards in practice. They fire slow because they’re terrified of the empty seat, and they hire fast because the seat is already empty. Both are the same problem: no funnel. When you’ve got eight qualified people who already know who you are, you can afford four weeks on a decision, and you can afford to cut someone at week three who clearly isn’t going to work. Without a funnel, every bad hire becomes a hostage situation.

Social media is what changed the economics. A job board reaches people actively looking — a small, mostly desperate slice of the market. Content reaches the ones who aren’t looking but are open, which is most of the good ones. We built an audience of roughly 30,000 trades professionals by posting about the work itself: the shop floor, the pay reality, the career path nobody explains to a 22-year-old. The result is that candidates show up pre-sorted. They’ve seen how we think, they know the standard, and they self-select in or out before the first call. That’s a different conversation than “please apply.”

It also answers the fit question better than any interview does. Skills you can verify in an afternoon. Belief in how you do things, you can’t — unless the candidate has been watching you operate for six months before they ever raised their hand.

And one thing worth saying plainly: We have made most success across the trades because they are hurting the most when it comes to this, but implementing this when I was the VP or head of talent in other organizations it worked great too

The biggest lesson that we have learned as an organization about finding the right candidate is that it requires patience.

Everyone knows that when you open a new role, you are going to be flooded with resumes and potential candidates. And it is easy to pick the resume with the right keywords and credentials and just say that you found a winner.

In reality, it’s not that easy. Finding the perfect candidate is so much more than what they claim they can do on a resume. Are they the right fit for the team? Will their presence disrupt or light a new fire? Are they looking for a bigger paycheck or seeking growth opportunity?

But also, sometimes a candidate can have all the wrong answers and still be the right fit. So, it comes down to patience, investing the time it takes to weed through all the applicants until you find that gemstone you are looking for.

And that is why we do multiple rounds of interviews and tests. It’s as much an investment for us as it is for the candidate applying to the role.

One thing I’ve learnt from hiring for our sales teams here at Desky, we help businesses to source office furniture which is the best fit for their team and business needs, is that while sales record is important it’s only one part of the puzzle.

Of course, product knowledge can be learnt, given adequate training but other characteristics, such as good judgement, an ability to pick up on nuances in conversations, taking accountability and earning trust are harder to train into people.

Commercial sales is as much about the service you can rely on us for post the initial sale as it is about making that first sale.

There is nothing more disappointing than someone landing sales, but without an adequate appreciation of the customer’s needs. Yes in the short-term it lands revenue, but in the medium and longer term may cost repeat business.

Ideally you’re looking for someone who can tick all of the boxes, land their or beat their sales target and win the trust of their customers, as well as colleagues.

Someone who will listen before suggesting a product or service, who will explain the benefits and negatives clearly and will always do as they say.

Get really clear as a business on what it is that you expect from people in that role, in terms of skills, behaviors and sales figures and stick to those criteria consistently throughout the recruitment process.

During interview ask for specific examples where the candidate has had to manage a tricky customer situation, deal with an argument or take accountability for a situation. This will give you better insight into how they think, communicate, interact with and collaborate with other people.

Get examples and details rather than going with gut instinct on how confident someone seems during interview.