Case studiesCase study
Twelve years of hiring failure.
One discovery that changed everything.
- Client
- BabyEm Training Agency
- Industry
- Training & Education
- Role placed
- Operations Manager
- Process
- Full four-stage search
- Status
- Placed September 2025
For twelve years, every hire was a gamble.
Emma Dewey built BabyEm Training Agency from nothing. She knew her industry, knew her clients, and knew exactly what kind of work needed to be done. The one thing she could not figure out was how to find the right people to do it.
She tried Fiverr. She tried graduates. She tried consultants. She tried recruitment agencies. Each time, the pattern was the same: find someone promising, interview them, hire them, and watch it fall apart within six months. People said they could do the work, but that did not mean they were deeply motivated to do it.
The business stalled for two years. Not because of the market or the product, but because Emma could not get the right people in. She was surviving, not growing.
After twelve years, Emma was not just frustrated. She was defeated. She had started taking it personally, questioning whether she was cut out for running a business at all. She stopped growing the team because she could not trust the process.
"I felt really defeated by the whole hiring process. I was getting to a point where I was thinking this is literally the last hurrah, and if this doesn't work, maybe I'm not cut out for this. Even after 12 years."
Then someone asked the questions
no one had asked before.
What Emma thought she needed was not what the role actually required.
SuperHired didn't start by looking at resumes. They started with an in-depth questionnaire that asked Emma questions nobody had ever asked before... about culture, about how she felt, about what success actually looked like at 90 days. "You were asking me questions that I'd never had anyone ask me about," Emma said. "It kind of just blew me away."
The discovery revealed something Emma had never considered. The operations manager role she had been hiring for wasn't primarily an operations role. It was a systems-thinking role embedded in a relationship-driven team. The previous hires had been operationally capable but socially misaligned. They could do the work, but they couldn't do it in a way that made the team around them better.
For the first time in 12 years, someone was doing the deep work at the beginning. Getting to know Emma, her business, her values, and her goals before looking at a single candidate.
Right Person Profile: BabyEm Operations Manager
What discovery revealed
- Systems thinkingCritical
- Relationship buildingCritical
- Team cohesionHigh
- Process executionSecondary
With the Right Person Profile built, the search looked nothing like what Emma was used to. Candidates received a Job Deck covering everything: the company, the role, what was genuinely hard about it, the exact compensation, and what Emma was like as a founder. Those who were not aligned self-selected out before anyone invested in a conversation.
The setback
The first round did not produce the right fit.
The initial candidates were strong. They matched on capability and experience. But when the Work Driver profiles were compared against the environment assessment, two of three showed gaps in areas that Emma's team needed most. SuperHired presented the data honestly and recommended against moving forward.
"I never felt pushed. They showed me the data, explained the gaps, and said they wanted to try again. That was the moment I knew I was working with a different kind of firm."
The outcome
The operations manager who was placed did not just fill a seat. She transformed how BabyEm worked. Within the first 90 days, she had introduced structured L10 meetings, sorted the operational systems that had been held together by habit, and immediately started taking things off Emma's plate. "She has just outperformed all expectations," Emma said. "I'd never had anyone do that."
The difference wasn't that this person was more skilled than previous hires. The difference was that her behavioral patterns, her pace, her communication style, and her emotional drivers were aligned with how BabyEm actually operated.
Jelena was placed in September 2025.
12 years
of hiring failure
Every method tried. Every one failed.
Strong
behavioral alignment
Mapped across functional, social, and emotional Work Drivers before the offer.
The candidate's perspective
Jelena was not looking for a job.
She was recommended by a friend. When she received the Job Deck, she said she had never seen such a detailed job description. "It was really describing me," she said. "You showed the good, the bad, and the ugly. I did not have a feeling that you were selling the role."
The salary transparency surprised her. The process felt less like a job search and more like a conversation between two sides trying to understand if there was a genuine fit. She felt that SuperHired cared about her the same way they cared about the company, which she said isn't always the case.
Jelena described waking up without the anxious feeling she used to carry about work. She didn't feel the need to prove anything. She just showed up, did her best, and built something together with a team that fit.
"I haven't felt that this was a job search. I felt more that this was a job matchmaking."
The candidate experience
SuperHired asked every candidate for feedback, including those who were not placed. The responses were consistent. Candidates described the communication as transparent and the process as refreshingly human. Sara, who wasn't selected, said the Job Deck was more precise than any job description she had ever seen. "They really know what they want and how they want it," she said. "Which was amazing and refreshing." Paulo, another candidate who wasn't placed, said the process felt more professional and more human than anything he had experienced. "I don't feel like just a number," he said. "I feel really a person being approached."
"Even if they have the same luck as me, the process was actually enjoyable because you feel like you're talking to real people."
"I finally feel excited about the future of my business... and that hasn't happened in a very long time."