Harry Uffindell once watched a hiring manager interview 49 candidates for a junior designer role.
They hired the 50th.
When she signed, the manager’s reaction was “thank God we waited.”
Harry spent five and a half years building the team at Partly and is now CPO at Manifest.
On the next episode of the FNDN Series (coming out Sunday) we talked about how he finds great people and then keeps the bar high once they’re in the door.
He calls it Talent Cultivation.
Here are some of the tactics he says make the biggest difference:
Launch the role before you post it. The hiring manager and recruiter spend 30 to 45 minutes agreeing on a few things: the role’s “one thing”, the problem it solves, what success looks like at 90 days and at 12 months, and how they’ll test for it. (His team built a Claude skill so busy managers can talk their answers through on the drive home.)
Give someone the job of saying no. A bar raiser runs the debrief after the interviews. It starts with everyone silently reading the feedback, then skips the positives and goes straight to the concerns. It always ends with “what are we excited about?” If every score is a 3 out of 4, you’re probably settling.
Hire for care, then test for ownership. Ask candidates why they made each call and what they traded off to get there. Shallow claims fall apart quickly.
Ask who they’d follow. Harry ends interviews by asking which former colleague the candidate would join if that person started a company tomorrow. The same few names keep coming up, and become targets for hiring.
Play the long game. Keep a bench of great people who aren’t ready to move yet. Some of his best hires joined 12 to 24 months after the first conversation.
Win the top two or three in each year group. Partner with the leading student societies at the universities you recruit from. Once you land those students, the rest of their cohort tends to follow.
The full episode and write-up land in the FNDN Series on Sunday 1 November.
Subscribe here so it’s in your inbox when it goes live: https://fndnseries.fndn.com.au/