A CEOs Guide to Global Hiring | One to One Hundred

I wrote this guide as we started to spin up our Global Capabilities Center (GCC) in India. For a long time I’ve had the point of view that the current model of “three interviews” for hiring is a terrible way to pick team members. In contrast, a well developed, test-driven approach to hiring should give you insight into a candidate’s ability to, you know, actually do the job you are hiring them for. This guide is the process for that, lessons learned and how to knit it together with technology.

Traditional Interviews vs. Test-Driven Hiring

Let’s start with traditional hiring. This typically uses unstructured, short interviews aimed at assessing “fit.” Here’s what I don’t like about it:

Unreliable Predictors: Unstructured interviews have very little to do with actual job performance. Candidates who interview well are, well, candidates that interview well. All you’ve learned is that they can talk pretty. You’ve learned very little about their efficacy on the job.
Narrow Focus: Traditional interviews at best test how well candidates answer questions on the spot. We’re mostly learning how effective they are at making shit up under pressure and managing a conversation. Skills like coding ability, writing proficiency, or problem-solving aptitude aren’t directly observed.
Subjectivity: Interviews are ridiculously subjective. In my experience people are really judging candidates on confidence and charisma not competence.
Stress and Performance: For most people, interviews are stressful. Unless you’re running a boiler room you’ll likely have a very different day-to-day working environment you operate in. I don’t care how articulate a developer is under the pressure of an interview. I care a lot about them writing smart, high quality code in a supportive, structured environment.

In contrast, a test-driven hiring process focuses on demonstration of skills and, ideally, drive:

Real-World Skill Assessment: Work simulations, coding tests, and case exercises reflect how a candidate will perform on the job. Instead of talking about working we watch them work. Candidates demonstrate their abilities in scenarios mirroring, ideally very closely, what they’d do on the job. This reduces reliance on past titles or degrees and emphasizes what candidates can do in practice.
Objective Evaluation: Structured assessments yield tangible results (scores, work outputs) that can be compared uniformly across candidates. By focusing on quantifiable competencies, companies can make hiring decisions based on data rather than gut feel, which helps reduce bias and increase hiring accuracy. Ideally, coding challenge scores or writing samples are blind-reviewed to avoid any demographic bias.
Depth Over Demeanor: A test-driven approach prioritizes substantive abilities (e.g. writing a piece of content, coding a module, creating a product plan) over how charming or quick-thinking someone is in an interview. Ideally, this also gives some insight into candidates that are intrinsically driven to produce quality work (i.e. by the job itself) rather than those who are chasing a paycheck.
Predictive: The data shows competency-based hiring correlates strongly with better outcomes. Companies are 98% more likely to retain top performers when they hire based on demonstrated competencies, and they achieve a 107% higher chance of a good role fit compared to hiring based on resumes alone. In practice, this means a well-designed test-driven process yields candidates who ramp up faster and excel longer in their roles.

The Process – How It All Works

1. Role Definition

Start with clear and detailed descriptions for each role. Include in this quite a bit about HOW the person is expected to do the role. Specifically, the technology we expect this person to use in the role or the technical environment we expect them to develop in. How come? Well, have you’ve ever taken a sales rep that’s only worked in Salesforce and dropped them into Hubspot? It’s like converting a buddhist to a catholic. Not a trivial transition. Doable but tough. Switching technical environments is tough. Unless it’s a really technically curious person, and those are rare, you’re signing up for a lot of training costs. What we’re trying to do here is:

Define what this person is responsible for – the final business result we want from them
Define the system of record or technical stack they’ll be using to achieve that

Most job descriptions do an okay job of (1) and a lousy job of (2). In my experience the best candidates, those that can jump in quickly and contribute in a meaningful way, need to meet both (1) and (2).

2. Screening

Screening is the process of taking all the potential candidates and finding the ones that are likely to be successful in the job based on readily available public (like their LinkedIn page) or semi-public information (like a resume). With that information in hand I screen candidates based on the following filters:

Industry Relevance – If the candidate has worked in your industry before. Moving from banking to B2B SaaS is like moving from the United States to Equatorial Guinea. It’s possible to pull off but in no means easy.
Business Model Relevance – If the candidate has worked for a company that has a business model that is similar to yours. An enterprise B2B SaaS Software company that “works” by customers paying money for the system is a radically different business than a consumer app that monetizes via in-app purchases. It’s not just that the business model is different – the entire business is setup and architected differently. If we want this person to contribute to the business quickly a key need is that they “get” how the business is setup. That avoids us having to spend months helping them learn our business.
- The ideal here is more than just understanding the business context
- The ideal is they have demonstrably impacted a metric that the business care about and have taken the time to communicate that in their resume
- What that candidate is saying is “I know what you care about as a CEO and I want to show you I can help with that”
- Obviously this is something that needs to be tested later but it’s certainly a great starting point
Automated Initial Assessment – Before we spend lots of time giving the candidate detailed assessments and projects I recommend a basic, online one. You’d be amazed how many candidates will fall out at this point either by simply not doing it or doing a sucky job in it. Ideal these tests cover three big areas (i) communication ability, (ii) domain knowledge and (iii) raw cognitive capacity. While you want to keep this stage as lightweight as possible I also want it to be substantive to weed out candidates that don’t really want to work here.

3. Work Relevant Exercise

We’ve got a candidate we think is a good match – now let’s test their skills. Each job has its own testing approach that mimics the kind of job they’ll be doing on a daily basis. Here are some common examples:

Software Development (Engineering)

Administer a coding test and sample project. The coding test will evaluate programming proficiency in relevant languages. The sample project can be done over a 48 hour period (see below) and presented the following day. Look for people that not only complete the project but focus on trying to solve the business problem the customer has in a compelling fashion. I.e. they aren’t just taking a specification and implementing it. They demonstrate some critical thought as it relates to the issue.

The testing platform you chose here will support timed coding problems, automated scoring, and plagiarism checks. Is that going to get you a perfect reflection of the candidate? No. Is it going to be way better than just talking to them. Definitely.

Quality Assurance (QA)

Present QA candidates with an old version of your application that’s got some bugs. Task them with writing test cases for a few features and then executing those test cases. The goal is to test their domain knowledge of QA processes, their ability to take a specification and turn it into a test plan, their attention to detail and their ability to ask for more information when the specification is (as it always is) unclear on certain points.

Product Management

Give them an exercise for a real world feature that you are currently considering. Think: something in the backlog where there’s a degree of problem definition but that’s about it. Have them come back with a well defined definition of the feature that matches whatever your internal feature definition structure is. If you don’t have one you can use ours.

For this scenario, I’d recommend more like 48 hours and have them think through the business problem, why it’s worth solving, how this makes sense in our competitive space, what we need to build and how we’d validate that we solved the problem. We’re also evaluating their ability to communicate all that clearly in writing.

Content Generation

Assess content candidates with a writing and research assignment. For example, ask them to produce a short blog post on a relevant topic or to curate and summarize content from given sources. As part of this give them your style guide and assess their conformance to it. Expect that they’ll use an LLM to generate content – and that’s just fine. We want them to leverage AI here. We’re not testing for that. We’re actually testing for how well they use AI.

Sales Reps

Use a role-play simulation focused on lead generation and deal progression tasks. Key idea is that we’re having candidates run through several realistic sales scenarios – pitching, objection handling, and closing – to showcase their communication and persuasion skills. Anyone can fake it once. It’s more difficult to fake it many times in succession.

Testing Platforms and Scoring

There are are a variety of platforms for handling testing that are provided by various and sundry online applicant testing firms. In my experience most tend to be structured around technical skills assessments. In that camp I always like HackerRank – fellow JMI Equity investment. A couple other recommendations I received from our People team at Level included Mercer | Mettl, Codility and CodePad. For sales role assessments you’ll likely need a different platform to simulate rep interactions. For example, Vervoe’s sales simulations put candidates in an immersive CRM environment where they must complete tasks such as writing a prospect outreach email, handling a customer objection, or leaving a voicemail pitch.

Across all platforms you’ll find that assessments are scored against a predefined rubric. In general I’d just use the out of the box rubric as it’ll keep scoring as objective as possible. The more you mess with the scoring the more you’re likely to introduce your own subjectivity into it. If you perform an assessment independent of a platform you’ll want to write up a rubric (LLMs are great here) and then use an LLM to help you grade the output against that rubric. You’ll then need to do a secondary pass on the LLM output to sanity check it against the rubric.

One final point: all these tests also serve as a motivation filter. Only genuinely interested, driven candidates will put in the effort to complete them diligently. Yes, we want to keep them short and not onerous. That noted, we are also filtering out people that are overly cocky (“You want ME to take a test?”) or just plain lazy.

4. Asynchronous Project Assignment

After the initial skill tests, the most promising candidates proceed to a deeper project-based assignment. This is a longer, asynchronous exercise that simulates a real work deliverable and allows assessment of both skill and work ethic. The project assignment is typically sent via email or a platform, and candidates are given a reasonable timeframe (e.g. 3–5 days) to complete it on their own schedule. The nature of the project depends on the role: a developer might build a small app or add a feature to an open-source repo; a product manager might create a lightweight product roadmap or perform a competitor analysis; a content specialist could be asked to produce a short content calendar or writing portfolio piece; an SDR might need to research a target account and craft a multi-touch outreach plan. Crucially, these assignments mirror tasks the hire will eventually handle, providing a “preview” of their on-the-job performance. Candidates are expected to deliver a tangible output (code repository, document, presentation, etc.) that can be reviewed by the hiring team.

What we’re testing for here:

Technical Depth & Problem-Solving: Because the project is more open-ended than a quiz, it reveals how candidates tackle larger problems, structure their work, and whether they produce correct, thoughtful solutions. For example, in a coding project, you can inspect code quality, not just whether it runs. In a content project, you can see their research thoroughness and creativity.
Intrinsic Motivation & Drive: As with the Work Relevant Exercise, the project is testing motivation. Did they just do the bare minimum, or did they go the extra mile (e.g. documenting their assumptions, adding a nice touch that wasn’t explicitly required)? The people you want on your team won’t be able to help themselves – they’ll have to go the extra mile. They’re the kind of people that want to own things and implement them fully. It will be clear they take pride in their work and the fact that this is a “hypothetical” assignment won’t matter. All work is worth doing well and fully.
Time Management and Reliability: Since the assignment is done remotely, whether a candidate submits on time and follows instructions is telling. Meeting the deadline with a well-structured result indicates good professional discipline.
- One additional thing you can do here is require a “progress update” during the project to mimic real-world communication. You can have that come in directly to your Slack instance if you really want to dial it in to your environment.
- Standard approach here would be to ask a candidate to send a one-day progress email outlining their approach.
Learning Agility: By design, the project should introduce a challenge that requires candidates to learn or research something new – typically relating to our business. For instance, ask a developer to use an API they might not be familiar with, or have a product manager consider a market segment they don’t know deeply. See how quickly and effectively they pick up the new concept or tool. A candidate with strong learning agility will adapt and deliver a solution, possibly noting what they learned. Those who only thrive in rote situations will struggle. This is a concrete way to assess the capacity to acquire new skills, which is crucial given the half-life of tech skills today

The submissions from the project assignment should be reviewed by at least two people typically the hiring manager and another senior team member from the function. As with the work relevant exercise it should use a scoring rubric to evaluate key criteria (e.g. for a coding project: code correctness, style, completeness of requirements; for content: clarity, accuracy, adherence to brief; etc.). Only candidates who meet a predetermined quality bar move forward. It’s important to communicate expectations clearly to candidates at this stage – both to ensure fairness and to keep them engaged.

To Pay or Not to Pay?

Paying people for the work they’re doing has the benefit of giving them (fair) compensation for value they are being asked to provide. The catch is it runs the risk of creating an employment relationship which we definitively don’t want. In general, if you have to pay, I’d consider a small stipend or honorarium for extensive projects, as a gesture of goodwill for the candidate’s time. You wouldn’t do this for the early exercises but it likely would make sense for the more detailed take home test.

5. Deep Dive Interview (Top Grading)

Past performance is the single best predictor of future performance. The catch is you’ll only get a clear read on past performance when you are forced to study it in painful detail. Top Grading is the only process I’ve seen that allows you to do that. Here’s the basic top grading process:

Define the scorecard – Write a one-page scorecard that defines the perfect person / “A-player” for this job. This should just be a scorecard version of your job description with a focus on the attitude and culture components that drive success here. At this point in the process we generally know the person can competently do the job – we’re focused on the softer and trickier to assess dimensions of attitude and motivation. The scorecard’s the rubric for assessing that and keeping you focused in the interview.
Have the candidate build a structured work history – I like to tell the candidate exactly what I’m assessing (the scorecard) and recommending a structure for the conversation. I then leave it to them to develop some briefing materials and manage the conversation against that. Starting point for this is the scorecard (above) and a basic interview structure template. The interview is essentially a three hour “tour” of a few key jobs or life stages. For each job have them provide employer, title, manager’s name, direct reports, key accomplishments, misses, and exact reason for leaving.
Run a three-hour chronological deep dive. Rough structure:
- Childhood, education and early career (½ hour)
  1. This is really about getting the deep background and context for the work story
  2. You’ll be AMAZED at how much of what makes the candidate them is pretty much set prior to them entering the work force
- Work history deep dive (2 hours)
  1. Pick two to three recent, substantive work experiences and discuss in depth
  2. Rough structure for that
    1. Context: “What were you hired to do? How was success measured?”
    2. Accomplishments: “Walk me through the biggest thing you achieved and how you did it.”
    3. Mistakes: “What didn’t go as planned? What did you learn?”
    4. Manager & peer ratings: “How would your manager rate your performance on a 1-10 scale? Why?”
    5. Reason for leaving: “What triggered the move?”
  3. We use the same structure for every role. Generally by the second one they’ll be off “script” and you’ll see the real person coming through. At that point you’re looking for patterns. Recurring wins, recurring frustrations, the kind of environment where they thrive, and the one that burns them out.
- Future (15 minutes)
  1. Where do they want to go in the future?
  2. What are their career ambitions?
  3. How do they see our company as part of that?
- Wrap-up and Replay (15 Minutes)
  1. I like to take notes as I go, see below, and then replay to the candidate my impressions
  2. They’ve just talked about themselves for a touch under three hours
  3. Here’s my professional, no BS impression of you after that time and your fit for the job
  4. I also use this as a close or reject point if I’ve made a decision by then
  5. Generally I know if I want to hire this person or not
  6. So if I want to hire them there’s no better way to get them on the train to yes then say
    1. Here’s everything I’ve learned
    2. Based on that I’m sure this is the right place for you
    3. We’ll get you an offer that you can say yes to immediately

Lessons Learned Running Hundreds of These

Anyone can fake it for an hour – very few people can fake it for three. A rehearsed “greatest hits” reel falls apart when you keep circling back for specifics.
Length will surface themes that the candidate isn’t even aware of. After a few roles you start hearing the same strength, the same blind spot, the same trigger for leaving. That’s what you’re looking for.
Patterns > Stories. One amazing project that they crushed it in is a prepared point of history. Three projects in a row where they crushed it is capability. Likewise, three “my boss didn’t support me” exits probably means they are just a bad employee.
Take verbatim notes live. Two reasons for that
- Paraphrasing later blurs details and introduces bias. I type while they talk; it keeps me objective.
- Typing what they’re saying will force you to pay attention. Easy tool.
Don’t rescue silence. If a candidate stalls out, sit tight. The first answer after a long pause is likely to be a real one – not something pre-packaged.
Energy matters. The energy you get in hour three is a great example of the kind of average operating energy of this person. If they’re still going strong in hour two or three that’s a high energy person. If they’ve died out by hour two just talking about themselves that’s a bad sign.
- Sub-point here is also just being attentive to your energy. If they’re sucking all the energy and life out of the room in an interview it’s pretty likely that’s just how they are. In contrast if you’re energized after a few hours with them you’ll likely get the same energy working with them.
Probe for the complex competencies and values. At this point we aren’t testing for the basics. We’re testing for the advanced stuff. Management style. Motivation. Values alignment. This is the tricky stuff and you’r looking for patterns that either align with it or not. Key thing I like to do here is prompt specifics. Whenever a story hits or hints at a scorecard point immediately dive in. This is the key point I’ll interrupt the interviewee at – the rest of the time I’m assessing how well they manage the conversation. There’s no correct way to do that but what you’re looking for is specific “Tell me more about the exact moment you took the reins and why” or “What was the thing your read that allowed you to come to that realization?”
- Don’t worry about getting the question right – a good candidate will interpret intent and modify accordingly. A bad one will try to answer the literal question.
- By prompting detail in the question you should prompt detail in the response. If you get a generic answer to a specific question that’s a sign the candidate either is (i) incapable of understanding the detailed nature or the question or (ii) incapable or producing a detailed response. Both are issues.
Ask for reference permission as you go. When they talk about the manager for each segment inject a question of the form “If we move forward, are you comfortable with me calling <manager’s name> to understand their perspective?” We actually don’t care so much about the answer (yes or no). What we’re really looking for is the response (enthusiasm vs. hedging) and how they frame it up. The only answer that’s ‘right’ here is an enthusiastic “of course, I’d love it if you call them.”

If Top Grading is so great why doesn’t everyone do it?

It’s painful. It’s painful for the company because we’ve got to teach hiring managers a new way of doing things and enforce it. It’s painful for all people involved as it takes a ton of time.

Hiring managers, in particular, tend to reject it as a process unless they’re deeply indoctrinated into the religion of Top Grading. Top Grading takes about two hours of prep and follow-up and three to four hours for the interview itself. Be prepared, the “average” hiring manager will fucking hate it because they think it (i) takes them away from their “real” job and (ii) puts a lot of needless structure around something they’ve done a lot.

In my experience hiring managers want to have a 45-minute polite, surface level chat and make a decision. They’ll tell you they know what makes a good candidate. “I’ve built teams before, I know what I’m looking for.” “I can ‘read’ a candidate and just know.” All of those statements are, in my experience, 100% bullshit. They don’t have a well defined definition of what good looks like. They have a rough idea of good. They have no process for testing for good. In fact they think tests aren’t helpful or that the role has some ineffable quality that can’t be tested for.

What’s happening here is that most hiring managers have a drastically oversimplified profile of the right person for the job. Basically they’re taking a person that was successful in the role for them in the past (or a boss if a first time manager), picking some aspect of that person and then applying that to determine who is “good” at the job.

The easiest example of this that comes to mind is hiring sales reps. Ask a sales manager and they can tell you ten different things that make a good sales rep. Lots of that will be items that no person could determine without a deep assessment: “great work ethic”, “ability to build relationships”, “grit”. I guarantee in that list, though, you’ll get something like “they played a competitive team sport in high school or college.” In the sales manager’s mind that means a few things: (i) they’ve got a good work ethic (tough to be a student athlete), (ii) they can get along with others (they were on a team) and (iii) they’re competitive. Well, shit, that’s three key things in selling – so they’ve got to be great?

The problem is the correlation between playing a competitive team support and success in a sales role is tenuous at best. Do I like candidates that play a competitive team sport? Sure, doesn’t hurt. But there’s a lot of people that played competitive team sports that are terrible sales reps. There’s also tons of sales reps that are very successful that didn’t play a competitive team sport. Should we exclude those? Of course not.

My point here is that we wouldn’t have a single step hiring process that says: “Did the candidate play competitive team sports? If yes, hire. If no, pass.” That’d be insane. And yet, that’s exactly what you’re hiring managers are doing unless you force a much more structured process.

6. References, Offer, and Closing

Congratulations – you made it – let’s close this candidate!

As a final due diligence step, perform reference checks focusing on the candidate’s past performance and work ethic. You asked for the right to call former supervisors in your top grading – now you’ve got to call them. Ask about reliability, initiative, and areas of improvement. Since references can be biased, keep the conversation brief and factual – use it to validate what you’ve observed (e.g., “Did Jane often take on tough challenges proactively?”). In practice I’ve never actually had a “bad” reference. It’s very risky for someone to tell you “don’t hire this person” and if a candidate thinks someone will give them a bad reference they’ll have bailed on the process well before now. That noted, you will get some subtle ques about the person and how they handle situations. So, yes, do the references checks.

I recommend background checks including credit checks, if allowed by the laws governing the hire. While it’s rare you’ll find something in the background check it does happen from time to time and it’s way cheaper to address at this phase. Once the decision is made, move fast to extend a verbal offer and a written offer letter. Top candidates are always juggling offers, so speed is crucial – a slow hiring process can cause you to lose talent to competitors.

Best Practices for the Indian Talent Market

We’ve decided to place our GCC in India which means thinking about the specifics of hiring in India. While this is in no way an exhaustive list, a couple of quick thoughts:

Emphasize Career Growth and Stability – In a market with high churn in roles provide stable, roles that offer long-term growth. My point-of-view is that where you work in the globe doesn’t matter. If you’re on our team you’re on our team. That means investing in everyone similarly and giving them all the same chance for advancement. As part of this your want to be clear that your operations are a stable, long-term aspect of the company. Seasoned candidates will likely be wary of startups or (more likely) GCC offices that are being “spun up” as quickly as they can be “spun down”.
Competitive Compensation and Perks: Ensure your salary offers are above market for the role and experience level. India’s tech talent market is very competitive with a lot of competition for top talent. Reinvest some of your savings from placing a role in India to pay more to a good match. This ultimately lowers your operational attention cost and gets you a more stable team. For perks it’s the same everywhere: health insurance for family, flexible time off leave policies, flexibility in work hours and remote work options (many Indian tech professionals appreciate companies that offer some flexibility and work-life balance.
Leverage Volume Thoughtfully: India will give you a high volume of candidates – even more if we aggressively promote being “above market” in total compensation. Use that to your advantage by being very selective with who gets a long form interview. An Applicant Tracking System with rigorous stage based scoring will help manage the volume.
- Given the volume, it’s also important to be respectful to candidates’ time – poorly designed lengthy tests will be get around as a waste of applicant time and your pool of applicants will dry up. Keep initial filters concise and only ask a small pool to do heavy assignments.
- Provide prompt and concise rejections for those not moving forward. Every person on the globe appreciates this and concise feedback on why we think they aren’t the right fit for the job.

Retention Begins at Hiring: Indian talent market sees high attrition, partly due to fierce competition. To improve retention, make sure you’re selecting not just for skill but also for genuine interest in the role and company. During interviews, probe why the candidate wants to join your organization specifically and look for alignment with your mission. Also, use the hiring process to set realistic expectations – don’t oversell a “cushy” job if it’s actually demanding, but do share how it’s rewarding. When extending the offer, a personal touch can help (like a call from a future manager expressing excitement). After hiring, invest in onboarding and continuous engagement to fulfill the promises made during hiring. Early career folks in India especially value learning and recognition, so having mentorship and clear goals from day one will reinforce that they made the right choice.