A practical guide for hiring managers and HR teams who want to build a hiring and onboarding process that actually works. Based on scaling a technology team 100% year on year with industry-low churn and recruitment costs — and the specific choices that made it possible.
Free. Practical. Organised around a simple question most organisations never ask.
Every hiring process is either a WOW, a MEH, or a WTF
That framing sounds reductive until you've been on the other side of it.
You walk into a company on day one. The car park barrier won't rise. There's nobody in reception expecting you. An HR person eventually appears, shows you to a desk, doesn't introduce you to anyone, and leaves. The laptop isn't ready. The logins don't work. By lunchtime, your main thought is whether you can still back out.
That is a WTF hire. Not because anyone meant for it to happen — because the organisation never explicitly designed what a new starter's experience should be, and the absence of design produced the outcome.
Most hires land in the middle. The MEH hire. A welcome pack with a mug in it. A group photo on LinkedIn. Mostly adequate on day one, then tailing off into sink-or-swim by week two. The new starter doesn't quit, but they also never quite arrive — and a year later they leave for somewhere that treats them like it matters.
The WOW hire is rare, and it is not expensive. It is deliberate. Every touchpoint — the call from the recruiter, the job advert, the interview process, the offer conversation, the first morning, the first fortnight — designed from the candidate's perspective rather than the organisation's convenience. When organisations get this right, their recruitment costs collapse, their churn rate drops, and unsuccessful candidates start recommending them to friends.
This book is about how to design for the third outcome.
Editor's note — where this sits
This guide sits in the Physics layer of the Idea to Value system — the layer concerned with how ideas actually move on their way to becoming value. Hiring is one of the most expensive decisions organisations make, and one of the most quietly botched. This book treats the whole pipeline — hiring plan, sourcing, hiring, and onboarding — as a system that either produces value or leaks it. The WOW/MEH/WTF framework at its heart is simple, durable, and one of the more useful small models in the Cultivated body of work. The induction section is developed further in the current essay The Basics of a Good Induction Process.
The Idea to Value system — five layers
The mapDirection & orientationWhere we're going and where we are
The physicsHow ideas move to valueThis book
The wiringCommunication & meaningHow clarity moves between people
The engineHuman creative intelligenceThe full range of intelligence applied to work
The flywheelHabits & compounding practiceSmall actions that build lasting capability
Where this comes from
The book was written in 2017, after several years of running hiring and onboarding for a technology team scaling 100% year on year. During that period, the team went from being decent at hiring to being known for it.
The numbers from that period, still reasonable benchmarks now:
- Churn of around 3% — significantly below the UK norm for technology businesses
- Average time from first contact to decision of around 10 days
- Most hires arriving through word of mouth, personal branding, or marketing — not paid recruitment channels
- Unsuccessful candidates recommending the company to friends
The book documents what was actually done to produce those outcomes. Not theory. A field manual, written from inside the work, while the work was still fresh.
The four stages
The book is organised around the four stages every hire moves through. Each stage has its own decisions, its own common failures, and its own opportunities to create WOW rather than WTF.
The four stages of the pipeline
The physicsEvery hire moves through four stages. Each stage has its own decisions, common failures, and opportunities to create WOW rather than WTF. The book is organised around them.
01 · The hiring plan
Defining what problems and opportunities a new hire will actually solve — before the role opens, not after.
02 · Sourcing
Attracting the right people with compelling communication, genuinely good job adverts, and a clear value proposition.
03 · Hiring
Moving people through the process — informed, cared for, respected — whether they get the job or not.
04 · Onboarding
Bringing people in with dignity, clarity, and efficiency — so new starters know they made the right choice.
What's inside
Beyond the four-stage structure, the book covers the specific moves that separate good hiring from mediocre hiring:
How to write job adverts that candidates actually want to read — and why most corporate adverts read as if the author has never met another human. How to balance salary with other benefits when you can't compete on cash alone. When to use agencies, when to hire alone, and how to do both well. How to run phone interviews that surface signal instead of eating time. How to design a face-to-face interview process that assesses for real capability rather than rehearsed answers. How to staple yourself to a candidate — the mental model that changes how you think about the whole process.
On the onboarding side: the specific mechanics of a sample onboarding process that works. How to design for WOW from before day one through the first fortnight. How the buddy system should actually function. How to handle the quiet gap between offer-acceptance and start date when doubt creeps in. What to post in the week before someone arrives, and why.
The common thread across all of it: treat the candidate and new starter as if they have a choice of where to work. Because the good ones do. And the process you design determines whether they choose you.
Who this is for
Hiring managers in technology and engineering organisations. The book was written from specifically that context, and the examples are drawn from it. Technology hiring has its own dynamics — high demand, strong candidate power, remote and hybrid complications, the particular challenge of assessing technical capability under interview conditions.
HR leaders and talent teams in any industry where candidate experience is becoming a competitive differentiator. The WOW/MEH/WTF framework translates directly.
Founders and early-stage leaders who are about to scale their first team and want to get the system right before bad habits become institutional.
Managers who have inherited a broken hiring process and want a clear, practical framework for rebuilding it without starting from zero.
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Four-stage pipeline
Physics layer
A free onboarding example plan is available here on Trello.
The companion piece on the onboarding side
The onboarding section of this book is the foundation for a more developed piece on the Cultivated site:
→ The Basics of a Good Induction Process — the current essay-length treatment of what this book calls the onboarding stage. Focused specifically on the induction side, with the argument developed further and the examples updated.
The book is the full field manual covering the whole pipeline. The article is the sharpest version of the onboarding argument on its own. Read the article first if onboarding is your immediate problem. Read the book if you want the full system.
When the problem is bigger than the book
The field manual is the self-serve version of this work. It gives you the framework, the language, and the specific practices — and for many organisations, that is enough to make a meaningful improvement.
For others, the problem is more embedded. The hiring process is broken in ways that are visible but resistant to fixing — because it involves multiple stakeholders who aren't aligned, or because the root issues sit in how the organisation thinks about what it's hiring for, not just how it runs the process. When that's the case, a book is a starting point, not a solution.
The Join Our Company engagement works with hiring managers and people partners together, over four to eight weeks, to see where the process is actually breaking, rebuild what needs rebuilding, and develop the capability that holds it in place afterwards. Not a workshop. Not a training session. A diagnostic and advisory engagement that ends with a functioning system rather than a better understanding of why the current one doesn't work.
When the book isn't enough
Diagnostic & advisory engagementJoin Our Company — the engagement
For organisations where the hiring and onboarding problem is more embedded than a field manual can fix on its own
Works with hiring managers and people partners together — not separately — to see where the process is genuinely breaking, rebuild what needs rebuilding, and develop the capability that holds the new system in place. The output is a functioning hiring and onboarding process, not a better understanding of why the current one doesn't work.
Format
Diagnostic & advisory
Not a training session or workshop
Duration
4–8 weeks
Optional follow-on available
For
Leaders & HR partners
Working together, not in separate streams
Outcome
A rebuilt system
With the capability to sustain it
The distinction matters: this engagement is diagnostic first. It starts by finding out what is actually happening — not what the process deck says should happen — before touching anything. Most hiring problems are not what they appear to be on the surface.
Twenty minutes to talk through where your process is breaking — no pitch, no pressure. Or explore the full thinking partnership page for the broader range of engagement work.
Related work in the Cultivated library
If the systemic thinking behind the book interests you, two other pieces of work go further:
→ The Idea to Value system — the broader framework for how ideas become value in organisations. Hiring is one of the most expensive ways organisations spend time, energy, and money. The Idea to Value system gives you the wider architecture for thinking about where that investment actually pays off.
→ Tech Portfolio Field Guide — for technology leaders specifically, the diagnostic framework for where value is being created or leaking across a whole portfolio. Hiring decisions show up in the portfolio picture more than most leaders notice.