For six years at Ketchapp, I built and grew several technical teams, including Development, QA and Data Engineering. I hired people with very different profiles, for roles that each had their own constraints, responsibilities and ways of contributing to the company’s goals.

Over time, one conviction emerged: a high-performing team is not simply the result of putting skilled people together. It is built around a clear mission, shared expectations and an honest understanding of the work ahead.

That alignment starts during recruitment.

Hiring as quickly as possible: a false economy

When a team is short-staffed, the first instinct is often to open a role as quickly as possible. When the pressure is on, every week seems to matter, and taking time to prepare the recruitment process can feel like delaying the solution.

Yet rushing is a false economy. A recruitment process launched before the roadmap, mission and responsibilities of the future team member have been properly defined is very likely to fail. Even an excellent person cannot succeed in the long term if the scope of the role remains unclear or does not match what they were told.

Before publishing a vacancy, you need to understand why the team is hiring, what the person will need to accomplish, which skills are genuinely essential and which ones they will be able to develop. You also need to describe their day-to-day work, the people they will interact with, the constraints they will face and how their success will be assessed.

You then need to make real time for the recruitment process itself. This means:

  • defining the role;
  • preparing how to present it;
  • reviewing applications;
  • interviewing candidates properly and answering their questions as transparently as possible;
  • preparing the interview questions and, where appropriate, a technical exercise.

If the hiring manager cannot give these steps the attention they require, the quality of the conversations and decisions will inevitably suffer. Rushed recruitment quickly becomes counterproductive. You risk:

  • presenting an incomplete mission;
  • prioritising immediate availability over genuine fit;
  • frustrating the new team member if the role they encounter does not match the one described during the recruitment process.

Taking your time does not mean dragging out the process unnecessarily. It means preparing the recruitment before launching it and remaining available throughout. If the team cannot devote the time needed to prepare it properly, it is better to postpone it, even by a month, than to start a process it cannot manage properly.

A poorly prepared recruitment process can weaken a team for several months: a misunderstanding about the mission or an imprecise job description is enough to create lasting misalignment.

As La Fontaine’s famous moral puts it: “There is no point in running; you have to start at the right time.”

Start by presenting the team

I created a presentation that I used at the beginning of every interview. Before asking candidates to describe their experience, I introduced the company: what it does, its different departments, their responsibilities and how they work together.

I then presented my own department in more detail, explaining its place within the organisation, the teams within it and what we did every day. This progression took the candidate from the broader context to the specific mission for which we were recruiting.

The presentation covered:

  • the company’s activity and organisation;
  • the different departments and how they interacted;
  • the role of my department within that structure;
  • the team’s mission and the problems it needed to solve;
  • the people who used our tools or depended on our work;
  • the technologies we actually used every day;
  • what already existed and what still needed to be built;
  • the main technical and organisational constraints;
  • the level of autonomy and responsibility expected.

The aim was not to deliver a corporate pitch or sell the role at any cost. I wanted to give candidates a sufficiently clear picture of its reality, including the less glamorous parts.

A candidate should not find out after joining what could have been explained during the interview.

This detailed presentation helped candidates understand the company, see where the team fitted into the wider organisation and form a concrete picture of the role. It then gave them an opportunity to make connections between the role and their own experience, and to explain how they could contribute to the mission.

Reduce stress to improve the conversation

Starting the interview this way had another advantage: candidates were not immediately put in a position where they had to sell themselves.

They had context first. They knew who we were, what we were trying to achieve and why we wanted to grow the team. This reduced some of the stress and made the rest of the conversation much more concrete.

When it was time to discuss their experience, candidates could connect it to the mission, explain what interested them and flag anything that felt less aligned with their expectations.

Their questions also became more precise. They were no longer just about technologies or benefits, but about responsibilities, trade-offs, users and how the work was actually organised.

The interview felt more like a professional conversation than an exam.

Find the common ground

Once I had presented the company, the team and the mission, I invited the candidate to talk through their own experience. We had each covered the part we had prepared: I had explained the context and the role; they had presented their experience, skills and expectations.

From there, the conversation became far less structured and sometimes a little chaotic. We moved naturally from a project to a constraint, an interest or a question. That was often when the most interesting exchanges began: we were no longer following a prepared sequence but looking for the places where their experience, their ambitions and our mission could meet.

The team was assessing a candidate, but the candidate also needed to be able to assess the team. This freer exchange allowed us to determine whether we genuinely wanted to work together.

What I learned after six years

Over those six years, this method never let me down. Every person I hired performed extremely well and was happy working with us. That outcome did not come from the quality of the candidates alone: it also came from the alignment we built before they even joined.

Making a serious investment from the very beginning of the recruitment process is often decisive. A carefully prepared presentation, the time given to the conversation and precise answers can set your company apart when a candidate is considering several opportunities. That investment shows them that hiring them matters and that the team knows why it wants them to join.

The commitment then becomes mutual. The better candidates understand the mission and take part in an honest conversation, the more they begin to picture themselves in the role and invest in the future collaboration.

That commitment, however, needs to continue after recruitment. Onboarding is just as decisive: from the very first days, it needs to confirm what was presented during the interviews. Those first interactions leave a lasting impression of the team. If the team does not invest in welcoming and supporting a new colleague, it can hardly expect them to invest fully in return.

A team’s performance therefore does not begin on a new colleague’s first day. It starts when you define why you want to hire someone, grows through the quality of the conversations that allow both sides to decide whether they have good reasons to work together, and is reinforced by the care invested in onboarding.

Successful recruitment is not only about finding someone who can do the job. It is about creating the conditions that make them want to do it with the team.