What Is Discovery-Led Hiring?
Discovery-led hiring follows six stages: Discover, Define, Headhunt, Understand, Evaluate and Start well. See how the role and evidence guide the search.
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Kill the Resume
A practical guide to defining the work, finding the right people and building a stronger team. Start with the job your business needs, then find the person who can grow with it.
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Paid live work simulations
Hiring for your agency? Learn how to design, prepare and run a paid, live work simulation before making an offer.
Watch the lesson
Behavioral Matching in Hiring
Behavioral matching looks at what someone needs from work across functional, social, and emotional Work Drivers. How it works and why it beats interviews alone.
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AI or Manual Recruiting: Which Parts to Automate and Which to Keep Human
AI handles searching. Humans own judgment. The companies getting this right combine them deliberately. Here's the partnership framework that actually works.
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AI that helps people work better.
Where AI can improve the experience for employees and candidates.
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Better hiring starts with context.
Why role context, candidate needs and honest conversations matter.
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Build a team that can scale.
Clear roles, useful systems and the people who help a business grow.
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Define the hire before the search.
An agency hiring framework, from the work you need to the people you approach.
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Find work that fits.
Role clarity, Work Drivers™ and the conditions people need to do great work.
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Fix the hiring engine.
Where AI can help recruiting, and where human judgement still matters.
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Flat Fee Recruiting vs. Contingency Fees: The Math Nobody Shows You
You have been comparing recruiter fees for fifteen minutes. You have been comparing recruiter outcomes for zero. The fee structure does not just determine what you pay. It determines what you get, how long it lasts, and what you own when it is over.
Read the articleFlat-Fee vs. Contingency Recruiting
A contingency fee rises with the salary. A flat fee is agreed before the search and doesn't rise with pay. Here's what that changes for your next hire.
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How to Hire a Media Buyer Who Can Think Under Pressure
Platform certifications prove a media buyer knows the dashboard. They do not prove what happens when the dashboard turns red at 4:30 on a Friday and the client is on the phone. Here is what actually predicts performance under pressure.
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How to Hire an Account Manager Who Protects Your Clients (Not Just Pleases Them)
Your best account manager might be your most expensive employee. Not because of their salary, but because every time they say yes to a client request outside the SOW, your delivery team absorbs the cost. Here is how to hire for protection instead of compliance.
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How to Hire an Operations Manager for a Marketing Agency (The Role Nobody Knows How to Define)
You built this agency because you are good at the work. Now the work is managing the agency. Two competent ops managers already failed. Not because they were wrong. Because the role was undefined and they needed it to be defined before they could begin.
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Keep people in the process.
Using AI without losing the human connection at the heart of great hiring.
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Look beyond the job title.
Transferable skills, real culture and the role of human judgement.
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Make work worth choosing.
Looking at work as something people choose, not just something a business needs done.
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See the work before the offer.
How discovery calls and practical work help you make a clearer hiring decision.
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Stop Asking Whether Candidates Used AI. Ask Whether the Work Holds Up.
See how candidates understand the work, use approved AI tools and explain their decisions through a paid, role-specific Work Simulation.
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Stop hiring in a rush.
How clearer discovery helps you make a better hiring decision.
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The Agency Hiring Scorecard: 12 Questions to Ask in Your Next Interview
You have been asking questions that test how well someone interviews. Not how well they work. Here are 12 questions, organized by four dimensions of fit, that you can use in your next interview.
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The cost of the wrong hire.
Why the impact of a hiring decision reaches well beyond the recruitment fee.
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The Hire That Gave Me My Weekends Back
An agency founder tried twice to hire an operations manager. Both failed within four months. The third time, someone asked the right questions first.
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Treat work like a product.
Small experiments that help people teams understand and improve the employee experience.
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What a CV leaves out.
Start with the work, then look for evidence that the person can do it.
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What a Marketing Recruiting Agency Actually Does (And What They Skip)
You ask recruiting agencies to find great candidates. That is the wrong question. The right question is what your recruiter gets rewarded for. The answer explains why so many placements fail, and what to evaluate instead.
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What AI changes about hiring.
Work design, talent density and the limits of automating a human decision.
Listen to the conversationWhat Our Work Drivers Assessments Taught Us About Hiring Decisions
Four findings from our Work Drivers assessments about what predicts a hire that lasts. Pace, autonomy, and mutual transparency matter more than interview performance.
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Why Do People Who Interview Well Turn Out Wrong?
Interviews are weak predictors of job performance. Discovery-led hiring closes the gap by testing the real work. Why the gap exists and what to do about it.
Read the articleWhy Good Hires Fail (And It's Not the Talent Market)
Most new hires fail for reasons a resume can't show. The deeper cause is upstream: the role was never defined before the search began. Here's how to fix it.
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Why Hiring Fails at Marketing Agencies Before the First Resume Arrives
The pattern repeats: urgent hire, confident candidate, failure by month three. The problem is not candidates. It is that most agency roles are misframed before the search begins. Here is why, and what it actually costs.
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Why Your Last Hire Didn't Work Out (It Wasn't Their Fault)
Most bad hires at agencies are good people in the wrong role. The failure is the match, not the person. Why the fix is behavioral matching, not better interviewing.
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Work people want to stay for.
What makes a role worth choosing, and worth staying in.
Listen to the conversationWork Simulations in Hiring
How we design paid, role-specific Work Simulations: agree the criteria, prepare the candidate, observe relevant work and compare the evidence.
Open the guideNot sure where to start?
Start with the work
Define the role, understand the person it needs, then explore the full method.
See the evidence
Move from an interview to a useful sample of real work.
Understand the cost
Explore what a hiring fee pays for and what a poor match costs.