Ask HN: How to Prevent Bad Hires?

I was very obsessed with hiring great people for my company. The last two of my startups failed pretty much because of having a bad team, ignoring things about people at the start. I’m trying to solve this problem. If you have faced this in your work, it would be very helpful if you could help me shape a solution for this. Its pretty obvious for the first few people : hire friends, or friends of friends or through personal referrals. But things start taking a different turns after a point of like a series A or seed round when you start hiring rapidly to scale operations. Controlling the quality of people becomes a problem. And not doing that leads to a sinking ship. I talked to a few people. I realised that companies find it hard to find great people, remove the noise from the process and finally hire the right ones.

I run a very small operation but when I see people struggle with hiring, it’s often because they haven’t actually figured out what works best for their particular organization. Aside from a few very broad baselines, there aren’t any good general answers to ‘how to prevent bad hires’ because the answers depend so much on what you are hiring for and what the organization is trying to do.

I only hire friends or friends of friends for like the first 100 people. Like expand through the network of the existing people.

Interns are probably the best way to hire juniors at least. That way you can see how they work for months for very cheap and then make your decision.

It's odd adults don't do internships, that seems like a great solution on both sides to the current stalemate we seem to have.