6 Untold Rules for Hiring the Most Talented People

The best person for a role is almost never the one the job post describes. Here’s how to find them — and what it really costs you when you don’t.

You know the moment.

A role starts straining. The work is piling up faster than the person in it can carry. Something important is slipping, and you can feel it — a client going quiet, a project stretching, a good person on your team quietly drowning.

…or someone leaves.

So you decide to hire.

And the second you do, two things show up at once.

The first is urgency. You don’t just need a person. You need someone who can own this thing fast — walk in, understand it, and take it off your plate before the crack widens.

The second is quieter, and it sits in your chest for weeks: What if I get this wrong?

Because you’ve been wrong before. I know i have. You’ve hired the impressive résumé who couldn’t do the actual work. You’ve hired the person everyone liked who slowed the whole team down. And you know, somewhere underneath, that this one decision will shape the next two years more than almost anything else you do this quarter.

You’re right to feel that.

Let me show you the numbers.

The U.S. Department of Labor puts the cost of a bad hire at at least 30% of that person’s first-year earnings — and that’s the conservative floor. For a manager, SHRM’s data lands closer to 100–150% of their salary once you count lost productivity, the drain on your own time, and the replacement search. And this isn’t a rare accident: around 74% of employers admit they’ve hired the wrong person. Gallup found something even more sobering — companies pick the wrong candidate for management roles about 82% of the time.

Read that again. Not sometimes. Most of the time.

So no — the pressure you feel isn’t you being dramatic. Hiring is the most expensive decision you make on repeat. And almost everyone does it in a hurry, off a generic job post, hoping the résumé tells the truth.

Let me tell you a short story before we get into the rules. :)

A caravan master needed to cross the desert. So he posted for the strongest driver in the region.

The strong ones came. They carried the most. They walked the fastest. And one by one, they fell — because the desert doesn’t reward strength. It rewards the one who knows where the water hides.

The person who finally made it across wasn’t the strongest. She’d grown up reading dunes. She could look at the sand and tell you where to stop, where to dig, where death was waiting quietly under a pretty ridge.

Her superpower was never on the job post.

It never is.

Here’s the reframe I want you to carry into every hire:

💥 Everyone has a superpower. Your job isn’t to find “the best person.” It’s to find the person whose superpower is the exact shape of the hole in your team.

The strongest driver looks perfect on paper and dies in the desert. The dune-reader looks unremarkable on paper and gets everyone home.

Miss that, and you don’t just lose money. You lose the momentum, the morale, the client, the year. You put someone in the chair who fits the title — and never the terrain.

Now — here are the six rules I never break.

This isn’t the standard way to hire.

It’s just the way that’s built me teams I’m still proud of, years later. It’s the way I help leaders build their own teams today.

1. Define the role before you define the candidate.

This is where most hires are lost — before a single résumé is read.

A generic job post built off a title will get you a generic hire. “Product Manager.” “Operations Lead.” “Marketing Director.” Those words mean ten different things at ten different companies, and if you hire off the title, you’ll get someone shaped like the title and not like the work.

So before you write anything, sit down and get concrete. On one page, answer:

🔹 What are the 5 things this person will actually do every month? Not responsibilities in the abstract — the real, recurring work.

🔹 What do they own on a quarterly and annual basis? What are they accountable for over a longer arc — the outcomes, not the activity.

🔹 What does their day-to-day genuinely look like? Walk through a real Tuesday. If you can’t picture it, you’re not ready to hire yet.

🔹 What are the actual skills and function this requires? The real superpower the terrain demands — not the buzzwords, the capability.

When you’ve done this, something clarifying happens. You stop looking for “a great candidate” and start looking for the person who can do this specific job brilliantly. Those are very, very different searches.

And you’ll finally be able to tell the difference between someone who’s impressive and someone who’s right.

2. Be very, very involved. Yes, even now. Especially now.

I’ve been a manager for a long time, and I’ll tell you plainly: I built my best teams when I was deeply involved in the hiring. I haven’t changed that in five years. It’s time-consuming — I know. But with the right systems around you, you can protect the time for this. And you must, if you actually want the right person.

Being involved means you sit with the résumés in the first round yourself. At least for the first time you follow this process. Not approving a title and vanishing until the final interview. You sit with the HR manager leading the search, and together you decide — clearly — who moves forward and who doesn’t.

Again… Especially the first time, look at the candidates with your own eyes. Because once you’ve done it, you’ll know. You’ll build an instinct for the character a specific role and team need.

Let me be very, very generic here, because this shifts completely by role. Let me share a few example….For product, I look for an entrepreneurial spirit — people who’ve run something of their own, even a small consulting practice — and strategic or marketing backgrounds. For business analytics? A completely different profile. I don’t care where you studied. I do often look for a degree. And I’ll usually take the person who started working young over the one who didn’t — because it tells me they know how to work, and how to carry two things at once.

None of that is a rule.

It’s how my eye is trained.

Yours will train differently.

But here’s why staying in it matters: I have watched HR quietly pass over brilliant people because the résumé didn’t come from the “right” university, or didn’t show a clean, straight, stable line. Some of the best hires of my career were sitting in the “no” pile when I found them.

The dune-reader rarely has the tidiest résumé.

3. Bring your team into the room.

This does two things at once. It lets your team help choose the person they’ll work beside. And it lets you see whether this candidate fits the humans already in the room — not the humans in your head.

Here’s how to run it without chaos:

🔹 Use a shared booking calendar. On Google, set it so that when a candidate picks a time, the whole team is invited automatically. People confirm if they can join. If they can’t, fine. No pressure.

🔹 Give the team good questions and one place to take notes. I use Nova for this — what I love is that it offers sample questions you can edit, so the team asks sharper things instead of freezing. Everyone adds what they thought at the end, fully transparent, and you can share all of it with HR in one place. Use whatever tool fits you, but do this part.

🔹 End with one question. After every interview, ask each person the same thing:

“Would you want to work with this person — and do you believe they’ll help move the work forward?”

That single question cuts through more than an hour of debate.

Here is the template

4. The exercise comes at the very end. Never, never, never at the start.

I don’t always give a work exercise. But for some roles it’s the most revealing thing I do — so let me tell you why, and exactly when.

Today, with AI everywhere, a lot of people generate a first draft, never read it, and send it in. I’m not looking for output. I’m looking for the person who cares. Who works hard. Who actually thinks the problem through.

So when I give an exercise, I’m crystal clear about what I need — and I tell them plainly not to spend too much time on it.

Then, in the final interview, I ask them to walk me through it. I’m not listening for polish. I’m listening for passion. For the ability to take feedback. For whether they can hold an alternative view without getting defensive. I care less about how smoothly they explain it — as long as they clear the bar for the role — and far more about separating the people who went the extra mile from the people who didn’t.

Then I confirm that spark, live, in the room.

And here’s my rule, the one I never break: I never, never, never ask for an exercise at the start of the process. Only at the last gate — the final interview, when I’m down to two or three people. Asking hard-working humans to pour hours into a test before you’ve shown them any respect is the fastest way to lose the best of them.

5. Respect their time. Their effort. Their action of trying.

I want you to slow down here, because this is the part most leaders skip, and it’s the part that matters most.

The people applying to you could have been waiting on this for months. Sending résumé after résumé. Hearing nothing. Never knowing what went wrong. For many of them, this hour could be the day their life changes. It is frustrating, and it is soul-taking.

So be compassionate. Appreciate their time. And I’ll say it the way I mean it:

Especially respect their time, their effort, their action of trying.

I’ll repeat it, because it’s the whole thing: especially respect their time, their effort, their action of trying.

And while you’re in there with them — look behind the nerves. Here’s the funny, human truth: nerves hit the people who care the most. So take a minute. Let them breathe. Ask about the thing that lights up their eyes when they talk about it. Watch the stiff, shaky person from minute one disappear, and the real human show up. That’s the person you’re deciding on. Not the first two minutes.

You lose nothing by being kind. You gain a reputation people talk about long after they leave the room — hired or not.

6. Hire for the real human, not the rehearsed one.

In the last couple of years, I’ve watched brilliant candidates fall out of the running because they spent the whole interview reading answers off a screen. Feeding them back at us. And the authenticity just vanished.

So now I say this at the very start of every interview:

“We’re hiring for the real you. AI tools during the interview aren’t the enemy — they’re just standing between me and the most interesting version of you. And that version is the whole reason we’re here.”

Because I don’t want the polished answer. I want to see “how awesome you actually are.”

Hiring — Ro Fernandez

Why any of this is worth the time

I’ll be honest — this isn’t the usual way to lead. These are just my rules, the ones that have built me teams I’m genuinely proud of.

Teams that didn’t just deliver, but were fun to work with. That created a space people wanted to show up to. That stepped in for each other when things got hard. Teams that were autonomous, self-driving, passionate, authentic, and innovative — across every personality, function, and background in the room.

I’ve had the wins that look good on paper. Growing margins. Opening a new office in the US. Launching products in new countries. Helping organizations run eight times faster.

But the thing that brings me the most joy today is human. People I managed seven, eight years ago still reach out. Still tell me where they are now. Still ask for advice.

That’s what makes me very, very happy.

Because you’re not filling a seat. You’re choosing who you get to build the future with.

Treat that choice — and every person in it — like it matters. Because it’s the most expensive one you make. And the most human.

Resources mentioned in this post

I’ve packaged the exact tools I use for all of this. If they’d help you, they’re yours — no pitch, no email wall.

→ The Interview Session — the shared question set and team note-taking format I run with my whole team (the one that ends with “would you want to work with this person?”) Interview session

→ The Hiring Process — my full step-by-step, from the one-page role definition to the final-gate exercise, so nothing gets rushed or skipped > The process and the templates

→ The Onboarding Process — because how you welcome someone in their first weeks decides whether all this careful hiring actually sticks. Process and templates

Other leadership tools you may need: https://novatools.org/leadership-os/

And if you want a structured way to run interviews and onboarding as a team — with transparency built in — that’s exactly what we’ve built free tools for at Nova → novatools.org

If this resonated, share it with one leader who’s hiring right now. That’s the best way to support this work.

— Ro