Knowledge Hub
What we have learned about hiring, written down properly.
Practical writing on how roles get defined, how candidates get judged, and why so much of both goes wrong. Everything here is readable without a form, and searchable once it is written.
The library
Everything we have written.
4 articles
- Interview Intelligence·5 min
What a system design round actually tells you
I expected the strongest candidates to draw the neatest diagrams. It turned out to be closer to the opposite. A messy canvas is usually thinking happening in front of you; a tidy one is often a design that was decided before the conversation started.
- Interview Intelligence·4 min
We spent months trying to cheat our own interview system
Before letting anyone else near it, we attacked the platform ourselves — phones under the camera, second screens, earpieces, someone sitting just out of frame. Here is what worked, what did not, and what I am still not confident about.
- Recruitment·5 min
Why senior hires fail in the first year
The strongest candidate I have interviewed was a unanimous yes and a bad hire. Nothing about him was fake. We had simply spent the whole process checking what he knew, and none of it checking how he worked.
- Hiring Methodology·5 min
Why job descriptions fail before anyone applies
A job description records what someone will do. It rarely records the problem the role exists to solve, and every stage after it inherits that gap.
Start here
Six questions, answered without the download form.
These are the questions people arrive with. Each answer is short on purpose, and each one points at the page that treats it properly.
- How can we improve hiring?
- Start earlier than the interview. Most of the improvement available to a hiring team sits in the week before anyone is sourced, when the role is defined and the criteria are agreed. Teams that fix the definition find the interviews get easier on their own.The four stages, in order
- What makes hiring decisions fail?
- Not one broken step, but a small loss of fidelity at every handoff. The business problem becomes a requirements list, the list becomes search terms, and by the decision the team is working from impressions rather than anything it can point to.Where the information leaks
- How should roles be understood?
- As a business problem before a list of requirements. A job description records what someone will do; it rarely records what the role exists to solve or what success would look like in a year. Everything downstream inherits whatever that gap leaves unsaid.Role understanding
- How should candidates be evaluated?
- Against the same definition, at the same depth, every time. Evaluation that changes shape between candidates produces opinions that cannot honestly be ranked. It also quietly filters out people whose experience is equivalent but described in different words.Candidate understanding
- How should interviews be conducted?
- Against criteria agreed before anyone was sourced, not criteria each interviewer brings on the day. An interview is most useful when it is testing specific claims the earlier stages flagged, rather than re-running a general assessment from scratch.Capability validation
- What hiring trends should we know about?
- We are not going to forecast. The shift that already matters is that screening is getting cheaper and faster for everyone, which makes the quality of the evidence behind a decision the thing that separates teams, not the volume of candidates they can process.What we mean by Hiring Intelligence
What we write about
Six subjects, each tied to a page that owns it.
Nothing here is written to fill a content calendar. Every piece has to make one of these pages more useful, or it does not get written.
- Hiring IntelligenceWhy hiring needs an evidence layer at all, and what changes when it has one.Strengthens Hiring Intelligence
- Hiring MethodologyJob descriptions, candidate context, keyword matching, structured interviewing.Strengthens Methodology
- Interview IntelligenceRunning interviews that produce comparable evidence rather than impressions.Strengthens Interview Platform
- RecruitmentHiring strategy, planning, building a hiring team, employer brand.Strengthens Solutions
- Product EducationReading an evaluation report, and what to do with the evidence in it.Strengthens Products
- Research & WhitepapersLonger pieces: hiring benchmarks, industry data, work we want to show properly.Strengthens Knowledge Hub
Something you want us to write about?
If there is a hiring problem you keep running into and cannot find a straight answer on, tell us. It is a better prompt than anything we would come up with on our own.