This morning, we hosted How to Hire World-Class Talent for the Talent ~ People Community. From early-stage chaos to growth-stage clarity, our speakers brought heat, honesty, and hard-earned hiring lessons. Big thanks to:

• Mai Medhat (Founder, Ginni AI)

• Xenofon Papadopoulos (CTO, Marshmallow)

• Michelle Coventry (VP Talent, Creandum)

• Dave Richardson (VP Talent, Monzo)

• Lucy Szypula (Head of Talent, hyperexponential)

Below are the standout takeaways, by speaker and session—plus four key hiring truths that kept coming up again and again.

Key Themes

🔁 1. Adaptability Over Pedigree

Across every speaker, there was a strong rejection of “big brand bias.”

• Mai: Highlighted the danger of hiring people who just want to copy/paste from previous companies. And, that big company hires don’t always thrive in early-stage chaos

• Xeno: Cares more about how candidates think, learn, and adapt—especially in fast-changing environments.

Key takeaway: Great hires aren’t always the most experienced—they’re the most elastic.

🔎 2. Precision in Hiring Signals

Everyone emphasised going beyond surface-level interviews.

• Mai: Always asks for real AI use cases to filter out buzzword candidates.

• Xeno: Digs deeper into reasoning, contradictions, and behavioural signals.

• Michelle & Lucy: Track quality of hire and use coaching-style feedback to build signal intelligence over time.

Key takeaway: Interviewing is a discipline—and vague instincts won’t scale.

📊 3. Make Data Useful, Not Just Present

Data came up again and again—but not just to impress. It was about influence, learning, and trust.

• Michelle: Made the case for using performance data to prove hiring ROI early.

• Lucy: Used scorecards and pass-through data to identify patterns and manage upwards.

• Xeno: Tracks pipeline conversion and onboarding ramp time—not just for TA, but for engineering ops.

Key takeaway: Use data as a conversation starter, not a scoreboard.

💬 4. Brutal Clarity > Employer Spin

Honesty about what the company is actually like was a recurring thread.

• Michelle: Stressed the cost of mis-selling culture—better to be direct than face attrition.

• Mai: Flagged the emotional labour of talent misalignment and its impact on founder bandwidth.

• Lucy: Culture docs / values (if brutally honest) can be used as a tool to help the right people opt in—and the wrong ones opt out.

Key takeaway: Transparency isn’t risky—it’s a filter. The more honest you are, the more likely you are to hire people who stay.

Founder Fireside with Mai Medhat (Founder @ Ginni AI)

• Early Hiring Lessons: Stop chasing brand names. Big company hires don’t always thrive in early-stage chaos. Hire for adaptability and motivation, not just credentials.

• AI in Interviews: Every candidate is asked: "How are you using AI? Give me examples." It's not just about using AI, but how they're applying it to accelerate, solve problems, and self-learn.

• Coachability > Credentials: The best hires aren’t copy-pasting playbooks from big names. They can flex, adapt, and co-create from scratch.

• How Talent Leaders Become Indispensable: Talent leaders becomes indispensable when they take ownership of cultural alignment, expectation management, and conflict resolution.

• Onboarding Matters: Remote or not, first impressions count. Have logins ready. Assign a buddy. Pre-book intro calls. Sloppy onboarding kills momentum.

• Salary Benchmarking: Titles lie. Use practical tasks to benchmark candidates, then slot them into a predefined range. Years of experience don’t always map to value.

• Hire for Now, Grow Together: Don’t over-index on future roles. Hire for current stage. Promote internally when possible—it drives ownership and loyalty.

• Scaling Culture: Culture scales when leadership commits to it. Weekly all-hands, retreats, and flexible but clear boundaries help maintain alignment.

  
  

Hiring Manager Spotlight with Xeno (CTO @ Marshmallow)

• Hiring for Drive: Understand what motivates candidates. Not everyone cares about mission—some want product impact, others care about WLB.

• Trade-Offs: Early-stage = hiring standout individuals. Growth-stage = hiring complementary teams. Be honest about which you’re optimising for.

• Adaptability: Don’t assume everyone will scale with you. Build org design with this in mind.

• Interviewing Style: Ask open-ended questions. Dive deep. Challenge answers. Look for consistency, curiosity, and clear reasoning.

• Career Trajectory: Strong signals from past roles matter—look for upward trends, not flatlines. Red flags include lack of self-learning or contradiction.

• Honesty in Hiring: Be brutally clear about how your company works. Mis-selling leads to fast attrition.

• Data-Driven Ops: Track time to hire, onboarding ramp time, conversion rates, and eventually post-hire success.

• CTO Involvement: Be hands-on when headcount is small. As company grows, shift to auditing the process (e.g. scorecards, test quality, data reviews).

• World-Class or Good Enough?: We must be honest about when we want to hire world-class talent and when we want to hire competent people who can get the job done, but sometimes we do need exceptional people and we should compromise less to get them.

Talent Leaders Panel (Lucy, Dave, Michelle)

Making Talent Strategic

• Lucy: Made Talent strategic by tying hiring to business outcomes and keeping leadership accountable.

• Dave: Clearly define who owns what. In-house = quality + cheaper. Agency = flexibility. Make trade-offs visible.

• Michelle: Talent hire in your first 10 = higher odds of unicorn outcome. Use data early, even if it's in a spreadsheet.

Using Data That Matters

• Michelle: Don’t just track volume—track quality. Scorecards, regression testing, post-hire trajectory. Data is cheap; hiring mistakes aren’t.

• Lucy: Be mindful of what metrics signal. If you push "time to hire” only to your team, expect speed over quality. Track pass-through rates and quality of hire to stay honest.

• Dave: Used internal performance data to identify top interviewers and build hiring committees. 

Performance & Quality of Hire

• Lucy: Performance feedback loop matters. Positioned quality of hire to her org as a coaching initiative, not a performance judgement. This helped build trust and encourage buy-in across the business. Now used to spot patterns, improve process.

• Michelle: Define what "quality of hire" means for your company. Start small. Iterate.

Training & Interview Enablement

• Dave: Interviewing is a muscle. Train it. In-person sessions. Feedback loops. Show people it's the most important thing they do.

• Michelle: Everyone trained during onboarding. Made it bespoke. 

• Lucy: Monthly training, LMS content, sessions with founders. Tiered training with founder-led sessions + VP sessions on bias. Even built 360 feedback loops to coach hiring managers.

Values & Candidate Alignment

• Michelle: Values = the questions. Don’t make them obvious. Score them. 

• Dave: Bring values interviews earlier. Patterns of misalignment often show up before the final round.

• Lucy: Used to save values for final round. Now brought signals earlier. Built question banks to help hiring managers assess culture fit earlier.

• Michelle: Encourage honesty, especially around equity, risk, and working style. Transparency upfront avoids churn later.

Missed it?

Follow us to hear about the next one. In the meantime, steal these insights. Share them with your team. And whatever you do—train your interviewers.