The Talgo Blog

I’ve worked closely with dozens of founder-led companies that have fallen on hard times, often in the context of a private equity buyout.

It’s clear when a founder or founding team has failed to pursue a winning hiring strategy. You can see the “scar tissue” from prior bad decisions in the form of ...

I’ve worked with hundreds of organizations to help them build world-class hiring and interviewing practices. Some of the outcomes have been transformative, and (admittedly) some of them have not.  

There is one factor, above all, that determines how good your company can get.  

If this factor is p...

Most interviewers make "depth" mistakes when diving into candidates' stories. Fundamentally, there are 2 kinds of mistakes here: 

1. Not diving deep enough (no substance)
2. Diving too deep (largely into irrelevant areas)

The first point: the majority of your time in an interview should be spent hearin...

AI is already shifting the hiring landscape dramatically. Several startups have seized the opportunity to build tools that help with everything from role definition to sourcing to interview workflow, data capture and analysis. 

Make no mistake, AI will utterly transform hiring, and the transformati...

A hidden theme in diagnosing interviewing and hiring problems: failure To communicate. Here are 6 inflection points in your hiring pipeline you can improve: 
 
1. Define the role. (Communicating with yourself and your teammates.) 
 
Get the results you expect in writing. And get aligned with your teamma...

Over the past 10+ years, I’ve asked several thousand business leaders (investors, entrepreneurs, executives, hiring managers) two simple questions: 

1. How important is your ability to hire/assess exceptional talent?

2. How confident are you in your ability to hire/assess exceptional talent?

...

(Also known as "Shut Up And Get Curious!")

Our job is helping leaders become exceptional at evaluating talent. One of the hardest (but most rewarding) parts is breaking bad habits. 

There is one bad habit we encounter with very high frequency, especially amongst startup founders. They tend to laun...

If you’ve started a new business, or are thinking of doing so, there are no shortage of books, courses and coaches available to tell you what to focus on in those critical early years. 

I would encourage you to talk to 10 founders, especially those that have done it more than once. Ask them what is...

Thought experiment: If there were a "leverage machine" where you could invest 4 hours and get 400 hours of free time back in your life each year. Would you play that game?

Put money aside for a moment. Even though we all know a great hire will add way more value to your business over the next sever...