Nobody wrote the bar down, so everyone invented one.
Culture fit is doing the work
Nobody can define it, so it quietly comes to mean people like us. The profile narrows every round and nobody notices.
Every interviewer has a private bar
Ten interviewers, ten definitions of good, and a debrief with no shared evidence to reconcile them.
Guides nobody opens
Competency frameworks written for HR, not for the person walking into a room with twenty minutes and one shot.
How the work runs
Built with your people, not handed to them.
Three phases, roughly a month of discovery at the front. The people who will use the standards help write them, which is the difference between a document and a habit.
Step 1
Define what good looks like
We partner with your leaders to name the behaviours and competencies your top performers actually share, job family by job family. Generic terms like culture fit get replaced with something an interviewer can gather evidence for, and diversity of perspective is built into the definition so you do not end up hiring one profile.
Step 2
Build the guides
Six to ten interview guides, one per behaviour or competency, written for the person in the room rather than for the intranet. Alongside them, hiring principles that tell your teams which tradeoffs are acceptable when candidates are strong in different places.
Step 3
Get them used
Recruiters, executives, hiring managers and recent hires are in the work from the start, so the standards read as yours. Pair the rollout with hiring manager training and the guides land in the loop instead of in a folder.
What you walk away with.
Artefacts your team uses in the loop, not a report that gets read once.
Values-based behaviours
The behaviours your top performers share, named in your language rather than a vendor’s.
Competencies per job family
What good looks like for engineering, for sales, for support. Not one bar stretched over all of them.
Six to ten interview guides
One per behaviour or competency, written for the twenty minutes an interviewer actually has.
Hiring principles
The tradeoffs your business is willing to make, agreed before you are staring at two strong candidates.
Evidence over impressions
Questions and probes that surface what someone did, not how well they interview.
A bar that survives disagreement
Something to point at in a debrief when the room is split.
Diversity built into the definition
Perspective designed into what good means, so the profile does not quietly narrow.
A rollout your teams accept
Your people helped write it, so it lands as yours. Pair it with training and it sticks.
How an engagement actually runs.
Discovery
Roughly a month. We read your reports and metrics, survey stakeholders, and run focus groups with recruiters, executives, department leaders and recent hires.
Design
We draft the standards, the guides and the hiring principles, then pressure-test them with the leaders who will have to hold the line.
Rollout
We train the people who will use them and hand over the artefacts, with support for the stakeholder presentations that get buy-in.
Teams who changed how they hire.
Quotes from the teams who have run this programme.
Amazon.com
Feedback was great, professional, entertaining, and respectful of their intelligence and time.
Recruiting Director
Disney
Awesome content and applicability. I left with a toolkit to be a better leader.
Recruiting Manager
Starbucks
I can leave today and immediately implement these strategies and tools.
Tech Hiring Manager
Google X
Amazing. Worth every penny. Highly recommend.
Recruiting Leader
Nike
Engaging, credible expert who spoke our language. Extremely helpful to move this organization forward.
Recruiting Director
Free tools to start with.
Three diagnostics you can run on your own hiring this week, before you talk to anyone, including us.
Contact us
Tell us what is not working in your hiring. If we are not the right answer we will say so, and point you at who is.
