Upgrade Your Hiring Process to Outperform Fast-Growth Pitfalls

When a fast-growing team feels staffing pressure, it’s easy to default to gut instincts—rushing interviews, relying on friendly chats, and counting on resumes to do most of the work. But time and again, organizations regretted ignoring proper process: urgent hires might look great on paper and charm their way through, but misalign on deeper values and end up causing months of missed goals or subtle team friction.

Contrast that with teams who overhaul their hiring: every interview is mapped to specific, teachable values—like 'invent and simplify' or 'customer obsession.' Each interviewer is assigned just one or two principles and comes armed with pointed behavioral questions. Instead of chatting over lunch, they ask things like, 'Tell me about a time you raised the quality bar, even if it meant extra work.' Answers are probed for details—how, exactly, did you decide what mattered?

Feedback is written in private, soon after the interview, and no one can see others’ notes until theirs is submitted. At the debrief, a neutral 'bar raiser' leads—no longer is the loudest voice in the room or the manager's preferred candidate a shoo-in. Bar raisers serve as a check against urgency bias, and their focus is on raising the team’s average with every hire, not just filling a seat.

While this process can frustrate those looking for shortcuts, teams that adopt it see longer-term cohesion, higher standards, and a gradual rise in collective performance. Behavioral science explains how this counters confirmation bias, groupthink, and stereotype threat—making better hires much more likely.

Start by specifying exactly what the new role should achieve and how it should contribute to your team’s big-picture ambitions. Assign clear values to each member of your interview team, and get them to prep real, probing questions that bring out stories of how candidates handled situations in the past. Make it a rule that everyone submits their written, independent feedback before even talking to each other about the candidate, which stops the group from swaying itself with early opinions. Empower a trusted bar-raiser to lead your hiring conversations, challenging everyone to stick to data and observed behaviors rather than gut feel. This may slow the process at first, but it’s how you keep your standards high—and your future bright.