If hiring feels hard, you delegated it too early. The founders who find it a grind are the ones who handed it off. The ones who still do it themselves call it the best part of the job. Hiring stays your job far longer than anyone tells you, senior roles especially, well past two hundred people.
A founder told me the other day that he’d hired all 100 of his people himself. Every one.
Honestly, it was a joy to hear. Because he won’t be sitting in front of me in two years telling me everything goes through him, nothing moves without his say-so, and he can’t work out how it got that way.
I see the same split in every founder-led business between 30 and 250 people, and it always traces back to one decision. At some point somebody decided recruitment was a task to hand off, like bookkeeping or facilities. It went to HR, or an agency, or whoever had capacity. And the moment it left the founder’s desk it stopped being a judgement about the future of the company and became seat-filling.
That’s the whole thing, right there. Seat-filling feels like admin, so you delegate it. Judgement doesn’t, so you shouldn’t.
This doesn’t stop when you get big
Take Brian Chesky at Airbnb. Early on, Sam Altman told him to spend half his time hiring. He didn’t, and he’s since called that a “death blow” to the company he was trying to build (Fortune, 2025). These days he recruits for roughly five hours a day, and the first and last call he makes every day is with the recruiting team.
The part founders baulk at is what he does now. He co-hires his executives’ direct reports. He skip-levels into a group of 40 or 50 people he treats as his own to hire, fire, promote and manage. And his test is blunt: if his execs could’ve made that hire without him, the person isn’t good enough (Fortune). Nobody at Airbnb builds a team in private.
There’s a name for it. Founder mode, a term Paul Graham coined off the back of a talk Chesky gave, and I’ve written before about why founder mode beats manager mode. Chesky is the best live example going: he founded Airbnb, still runs it, and runs it in founder mode long after it stopped being a start-up.
Founder mode isn’t about sitting in more meetings or having more opinions than everyone else. It’s about keeping the judgement calls where the judgement is. Hiring is the biggest one in the building, so the moment you hand it over you’re in manager mode, whatever your business card says. It’s the only way a bar ever holds. Every layer you stop looking at sets its own standard, lower than yours, because almost nobody hires above the level they were hired at.
And then there’s the advice everyone gives you. Build a great team and get out of the way.
Total bollocks.
Business is a team sport. The team are on the pitch and you’re on the touchline, coaching, for the whole match. You don’t pick a good side and wander off to play golf. That isn’t what Chesky is doing either: he’s on the touchline five hours a day, at a company that stopped needing him years ago. There is no point at which the most important work in your company stops being your job.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, because every founder says it. I haven’t got five hours a day. Nobody has. But look at what you’re spending those hours on. Sitting in decisions your team should make. Reworking something done by a person who was never quite right. Interviewing again in nine months because the last one didn’t stick. You’re already paying the time, just at the wrong end, where it buys you nothing.
Every place I stopped hiring, I paid for it
I didn’t always practise this. I built Rackspace UK from scratch to 150 people, and I didn’t personally hire the first 50 of them. A few snuck in I’d never have chosen. Then I took over IT Lab and had to swap out a load of staff I hadn’t picked. Undoing a bad hire is slow and expensive, and it costs you more good people than the bad hire ever did.
The starkest one was Pipex. I walked in as the new MD of hosting and could see within weeks that most of the staff were B and C players who’d resist every change the business needed. So I made 120 people redundant and closed the Nottingham office. That’s not a war story I enjoy telling. But it’s what happens when a company hires below the bar for long enough. The cost doesn’t show up as one bad hire. It shows up as an entire operation you have to take apart and rebuild. Left alone, recruitment quietly becomes the thing the whole business ends up waiting on.
You keep hiring the wrong people. Here's the toolkit that stops it.
Your A-players judge you from the very first touch
The person you most want to hire is reading you the whole time, and the read starts long before they meet anyone senior. Picture it from their side. You’re a genuine A-player, a senior operator with options. You reply to an ad, and your first conversation is with a junior person in HR who doesn’t understand the role and asks you nothing that would let them judge whether you’re right for it. What do you conclude? That the whole place is probably like this. And you’re gone, before the company ever got to make its case.
I’ve sat on the wrong end of this. I once spent a full day at an assessment centre, and at the end I asked the bloke running it to explain the science behind what he’d made me do all day. He couldn’t. It put me off completely. They didn’t pick me, but the truth is I wouldn’t have gone if they had, because the whole thing was nonsense.
First touch isn’t only the first conversation, mind. At Peer 1 in Southampton we put a pub in the office. We spent real money making the place somewhere you’d actually want to be, because an A-player walking through that door has made their mind up in about twelve seconds and you only get one go at it.
It worked in a way I hadn’t planned for. The Telegraph wrote the place up under the headline Is this the best office in Britain?. Helter-skelter slide, tree house, pub. We got famous in Southampton, and A-players started arriving referred by people they knew, applying for jobs they’d never seen advertised. That’s how I got my global VP of marketing. Somebody told Alan we were hiring, and he applied because he could walk to work, the first time in his career he didn’t have to trek up to the Thames Valley. That was magic, and it cost us a pub.
So don’t let a junior person in HR be the first point of contact. It should be the hiring manager. You can do the CV sift yourself. What an A-player is actually weighing is a great first touch and a great offer, so give them both, and put a repeatable hiring system behind them so the standard holds every time, not just when you’re in the room.
I can’t tell you the last time I hired the person with the best CV. I recently helped a client hire a Chief People Officer, and the candidate whose CV I’d ranked fourth is the one who got the job. Fourth. On paper he wasn’t the strongest in the pile, and he was obviously the right hire within ten minutes of meeting him.
So use the application itself as the filter. Ask for a short video or a covering letter, and only read the CVs of people who send one. No video, no screening pass. Sounds harsh. It isn’t. It’s the cheapest test of whether somebody wants this job or is firing the same CV at 50 companies without reading a word of yours. The ones who want it do it well. Everyone else filters themselves out, which is precisely what you want.
Hire for attitude, not a CV full of your own industry
Founders filter far too hard, far too early, on industry experience. It feels safe. It’s usually a mistake.
The best salesperson I ever hired at Rackspace was my wife, Geri. And she knew nothing about the internet. I asked her in the interview what she knew about it. She said nothing at all. Brilliant, I said. You’re hired.
Everyone else we had who knew about the internet wanted to talk to other people who knew about the internet. Geri didn’t care about any of that. She wanted to understand the customer’s business problem, and there were plenty of clever people around her who could solve it once she had. She outsold the lot of them.
That’s what hiring for attitude actually looks like. Not a slogan on a wall. A person you’d have screened out on paper. Industry experience is the easiest thing to screen for and one of the least predictive things you can screen on. Build the role’s scorecard around outcomes and attitude and screen against that instead.
What taking it seriously looks like at scale
After the redundancies at Pipex, we rebuilt from the ground up. We put 8,000 people through assessment centres and hired 99 of them in four weeks. My team thought I was barking. Barnaby Lashbrook was one of them. He’d built Supernames, the domain and hosting business Pipex acquired while I was there, and he was convinced I’d lost it. We both left not long after, he went on to found Time Etc and later wrote the foreword to my book, and he’s since told me it was the right call, once he’d scaled his own business.
Here’s why that difference matters more than founders expect. I’ve sat down with hundreds of CEOs and asked them what the productivity gain is between an A-player and a B-player. They typically say somewhere between five and ten times. Then I ask whether they’re paying those people more. Almost always, no. Some of them are paying them less.
Here is the arithmetic that shuts the argument down. It comes from Rick Crossland’s A Player Advantage, and I’ve walked founders through it more times than I can count. Same function, two teams.
| The team you have | The team you could have | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Name | Salary | Grade | Name | Salary | Grade |
| Adam Awesome | £70,000 | A | Adam Awesome | £70,000 | A |
| Ashley Amazing | £69,000 | A | Ashley Amazing | £69,000 | A |
| Billy Bozo | £65,000 | B | Abby Adaptable | £73,000 | A |
| Barbara Boring | £66,000 | B | Alberto Agile | £72,000 | A |
| Bob Basic | £65,000 | B | Alex Astonishing | £71,000 | A |
| Belinda Brackish | £66,000 | B | Barbara Boring | £66,000 | B |
| Charlie Charlatan | £65,000 | C | Belinda Brackish | £66,000 | B |
| Cheryl Crabster | £65,000 | C | |||
| 8 people | £531,000 | 7 people | £487,000 | ||
Adapted from Rick Crossland, A Player Advantage. Illustrative salaries.
Read what that second team does. You keep two A-players and two B-players. The two weak B-players and both C-players, four people at around sixty-five grand, come out, and three A-players go in at seventy-one, seventy-two and seventy-three. You paid the good people more per head, and the wage bill still fell by forty-four thousand, because you needed one fewer person. That’s the bit founders miss. You don’t raise the total to afford A-players. You pay more per head, less in total, and bank the productivity. In all these years, not one founder has argued the eight on the left would beat the seven on the right.
You haven’t got a headcount budget. You’ve got a salary budget.
This is where founders get stuck. They look at that second column and say they can’t afford to swap the B-players out. But they’re running the wrong budget. Your managers shouldn’t have a headcount at all. Give them a salary budget and tell them to spend it on the best people they can find.
At Peer 1 we paid at the fiftieth percentile. To land somebody genuinely good, you’ll usually pay about 120 per cent of what the people in those seats are on now. That’s not a reason to flinch. It’s just what the better team costs.
The number that matters was never how many people you employ. It’s output per pound of salary. Greg Crabtree calls it the labour efficiency ratio, in Simple Numbers, and I’ve had him on the podcast on exactly this. It’s why we tell founders to measure gross profit per head, not count heads.
So run it. An A-player is five to ten times more productive and costs twenty per cent more. Why on earth would you not? Your job was never to manage a number of people. It’s to manage the output you get for every pound of salary. Managers who think in heads will always tell you they can’t afford A-players. Managers who think in salary just go and hire them. And the mishire you’re avoiding to save money already costs you five times salary for a regular hire, fifteen for a manager, twenty-seven for an executive. You just can’t see it on the payroll line.
Hiring deserves your best hours and not your leftovers.
So what do you actually do
Stay in it far longer than feels comfortable. Co-own the hires two levels down, make the hiring manager the first human an applicant meets, get your offer and first touch genuinely good, and screen for attitude over a CV full of your own industry. When you’re tempted to hand the lot to somebody else so you can “focus on the business”, remember that this is the business, and putting hiring back among the three days of work only you should do is the work.
Of course, if the problem isn’t the pipeline but a brilliant hire who’s turned poisonous, that’s a different job. Read how to deal with toxic A-players before they wreck your business instead.
But if hiring feels like a grind, you’re not bad at hiring. You gave away the only decision in your business that compounds for a decade, and you gave it to whoever had capacity. Go and take it back.
Frequently asked questions
Should a founder really still be hiring at 200 people?
Yes, senior roles and the layer directly beneath them at minimum. This isn’t a start-up phase you grow out of. Your standard is the only thing holding the bar up, and the moment you stop looking, quality drifts down one acceptable-looking hire at a time until you notice, about a year later.
Isn’t it disempowering to hire my executives’ direct reports?
Not if you frame it as co-hiring rather than overruling. You’re not taking the decision off them, you’re raising the bar and lending your judgement. The candidate reads it as the company taking the hire seriously, and the exec gets the benefit. The ones who resent it wanted an easier hire than the job needs.
What’s the single fastest fix if hiring isn’t working?
Change who the candidate meets first. Make the hiring manager the first point of contact instead of a junior HR gatekeeper, and put real effort into the offer and first touch. Then add one cheap filter: require a short video or covering letter, and only screen the applicants who send one.
What should you do next?
If this post has annoyed you slightly, good. The issue is probably not effort. It is design. The business is asking you to carry decisions, standards and exceptions that should now belong inside the team.
The goal is not to disappear. The goal is to build a company where your best work is not dragged back into every operational tangle.
That is the point. Scaling is not adding more people around the same bottleneck. It is rebuilding the business so the bottleneck is removed.
Four ways to take this further
- Book a call. If growth is now making the company slower, heavier or more dependent on you, I can help you decide whether the constraint is people, strategy, execution, cash or your role as founder. No obligation, no pitch. You will know quickly whether this is the right kind of help.
- Grab the book. F**k Plan B covers these principles in more depth, with the practical founder lessons behind customer obsession, honest communication, hiring, small teams and managers who coach.
- Watch the £30m scaling video. Start there if you want the founder-level version of these principles, using Rackspace and Peer 1 as the proof base.
- Subscribe to the newsletter. Get direct, practical thinking on scaling, founder bottlenecks, leadership rhythm and building a company that can run without you in every room.
Your move. Open Slack, Teams or your inbox. Find the decision that should not have come to you this week. That is where the scaling work starts.