Hire for outcomes: what changes after the first hundred people

While a company is small, new people are often hired “for everything”: they quickly absorb context, cover various tasks and decide for themselves what to do. After the first hundred employees this model stops working — there are too many dependencies and the cost of a role mistake is too high.

We are changing our approach to hiring: roles get sharper, context gets more expensive, and the quality of leaders matters more than time-to-fill. Below is what exactly changes and why.

Roles get sharper

Instead of a universal description, we formulate a role through the expected outcome: what should change in six months and by what signs we will see it. This helps both the candidate and the team understand what is meant.

A vague role at scale turns into a clash of expectations: the person does what they think is needed, while the team expects something else.

Context gets more expensive

The larger the company, the more time a new employee needs to understand how decisions are made here, where responsibility boundaries lie and what counts as good work. That context cannot be transferred in a week.

So we treat onboarding as part of hiring: a plan for the first months, a mentor and clear expectations matter as much as interviews.

Leader quality matters more than speed

A leader multiplies a team's effect — in both directions. A weak leader costs more than several unfilled vacancies, so for these roles we spend more time and involve more people in the assessment.

We assess not only experience but how a person makes decisions, handles uncertainty and develops others.

Hiring is judged by the outcome reached in the first months of work.

Measuring hiring by outcome

The measure of hiring success is not how fast a vacancy closed, but whether the person reached the expected outcome in the first months and stayed on the team. We feed this data back into selection.

Sometimes the right decision is to leave a vacancy open longer than we would like rather than fill it with the wrong person.