June 2026

By Will Aldred at Built Different

You learn a lot watching hiring up close.

I've spent the last year running searches for founders across the Netherlands, wider Europe and the US. Technical, data, AI and leadership roles. Pre-Seed to Series B.

That's roughly 50 active processes. 50 different founders. 50 different versions of the same fundamental challenge: how do you find, attract and close the right person for your business at your stage?

And here's the thing... the founders who hire well aren't smarter than the ones who don't. They don't have better networks. They don't have more money. They aren't more impressive on paper.

They just do five things differently.

These aren't theories. They're patterns I've watched play out, again and again, across every search I've run. The winners do these things. The strugglers don't.

1. They know what "good" actually looks like

Most founders can describe the role. The strongest founders can describe the person.

Not in terms of years of experience or stack proficiency. In terms of how they think. How they make decisions under uncertainty. What kind of problems they get energised by. What kind of environment they thrive in.

When I ask a struggling founder "what does good look like?" I get a list of skills. When I ask a winning founder the same question, I get a story. "Someone who can walk into a room of stakeholders, listen for ten minutes, and identify the actual problem rather than the one they were briefed on." That's a description of a person, not a CV.

This clarity changes everything that comes after. The job spec writes itself. The interview questions write themselves. The decision becomes obvious.

If you can't describe the person you're looking for as vividly as you can describe your customer, your search is going to drag.

2. They sell harder than they screen

Most founders interview candidates. The strongest founders sell to them.

The market has shifted. Strong candidates have options. The "we'll do you a favour by hiring you" mindset died around 2022 and it's not coming back. But I still watch founders run interviews like inquisitions - testing, challenging, looking for flaws - and then wonder why their offer gets turned down for a bigger competitor.

The winners flip the script. They spend half the interview asking sharp questions and the other half answering the candidate's. They talk about the problems they're trying to solve, the things that excite them, the bets they're making. They make the candidate want to be part of it.

You're not just assessing whether they're good enough for you. They're assessing whether you're good enough for them. Treat the interview like that and the close gets easier.

3. They move fast... and visibly

Decision speed is the single biggest differentiator I've seen between founders who hire their first choice and founders who end up with their third.

Not interview speed. Not process speed. Decision speed. The time between "we've met the right person" and "we've made them an offer."

The winning founders compress that to days. Sometimes hours. They've internalised that every day they wait, the candidate's other options compound. References get done in 48 hours. Offers go out within 72.

The strugglers take a week to "think about it." They want to interview "one more person just to compare." They wait for a board meeting to discuss comp. By the time they're ready, the candidate has emotionally (and this is important) signed somewhere else.

The decision was always going to be yes. They just made it too late.

4. They trust the conversation, not the CV

The strongest founders I've worked with have all made hires that didn't make sense on paper. Junior people who turned out to be exceptional. Career-changers who outperformed lifelong specialists. People from sectors that "wouldn't translate" who translated brilliantly.

How? They stopped using the CV as a filter and started using it as context.

The CV tells you what someone has done. The conversation tells you who they are. The two are different things. A founder who hires only on the CV is hiring the past. A founder who hires on the conversation is hiring the future.

This doesn't mean ignoring experience. It means weighting it correctly. Two years of building something complex in a small team beats five years of maintaining something stable in a big one. Real ownership beats borrowed titles. Curiosity beats credentials.

The founders who hire well have learned to ask "what would this person be like in six months?" rather than "what have they done in the last five years?"

5. They own the hire

This is the one most founders don't want to hear.

The winning founders treat hiring as one of their most important jobs - especially in the first three or four critical roles. Not something they delegate. Not something they squeeze in between meetings. Not something they hand off to a recruiter and check on weekly.

They lead the searches. They write the briefs. They interview every shortlisted candidate personally. They close the deals themselves (or entrust Built Different to work with them).

The strugglers treat hiring as an interruption to running the business. They review CVs in the back of meetings. They cancel candidate calls when something more "urgent" comes up. They hand the close off to whoever's free.

Then they wonder why their key hires don't land.

Hiring at early stage isn't an admin task. It's the strategic act that defines what your business becomes. The founders who win treat it that way.

The pattern across the patterns

If you read those five things back, you'll notice something. They're not really about hiring tactics. They're about how seriously you take the act of building a team.

The winners aren't using better tools or smarter frameworks. They're approaching hiring like it matters - because at your stage, it does. Each hire shapes the next three. Each early hire shapes the next twenty. Get the first five right and the next five hire themselves. Get them wrong and you spend the next two years unwinding it.

There's no shortcut here. No tool that fixes it. No agency that does it for you. It's a discipline. And the founders who treat it like one are the ones I see closing the offers, building the teams and scaling the businesses.

The June playbook: 3 things to do this month

1. Score yourself against the five.

Pick your most recent search - open or closed - and rate yourself honestly on each of the five patterns. Did you describe the person, or just the role? Did you sell, or did you only screen? Did you move fast, or did you stall? Did you trust the conversation, or only the CV? Did you own it, or delegate it?

Be honest. The pattern you score lowest on is where your next search will break.

2. Write a new kind of brief.

For your next role, throw out the standard job description. Write a one-page document that describes the person, not the position. What they think about. How they work. What kind of problems they get out of bed for. What they'd find frustrating about working with you. What they'd find energising.

Use that brief as your filter. You'll be surprised how much sharper your shortlist gets.

3. Compress your decision window.

Before your next process starts, agree internally on the maximum time between "we've met the person" and "we've made an offer." I'd push for 72 hours. Tell your team. Tell your board if relevant. Tell your recruiter. Then hold yourself to it.

Speed is free. Use it.

What I'm seeing from my desk

The strongest founders are the most decisive ones. I can usually tell within the first 15 minutes of a kickoff call whether a search will move quickly. Founders who already know what they want and why move at twice the pace of founders still figuring it out. The clarity isn't about the role... it's about themselves.

Candidates are increasingly choosing on culture, not comp. Comp has flattened across stages. The differentiator now is the quality of the founder, the energy of the team, and the clarity of what's being built. The founders who can articulate this win. The ones who default to "competitive salary plus equity" lose.

The single most common reason searches stall is lack of founder time. Not bad candidates. Not bad processes. Not difficult markets. It's founders trying to hire on top of everything else without protecting the time it deserves. The ones who block out two hours a day for hiring during an active search close roles 40% faster than the ones who fit it in around the edges.

Tools

DM me on LinkedIn with any of these and I'll send them straight over:

SCORECARD - A 5-line role scorecard template. Forces clarity on what the hire actually needs to deliver.

LOOP - A structured interview loop framework. Who interviews, what each stage tests, how to avoid asking the same thing four times.

OFFER - A checklist for making offers that stick. Comp, work model, timeline, and the soft stuff most founders don't know about.

Because great teams are Built Different

Hiring question? Building a key team? DM me - always happy to think it through with you.