Notes

10 things I've learned about hiring

After years of hiring mistakes, I share ten hard lessons on culture, screening, and decisions that helped me avoid bad hires and build stronger teams.

Teerakit Chantrakul • November 17, 2025 • 2 min read

You know I’ve been struggling with hiring forever. But I finally feel like I’m getting the hang of it, and I wanted to share the ten things I realized. Honestly, I wish someone had told me this stuff way sooner.

1. Stop hiring if the house is on fire. Seriously, it’s way more important to make sure the people I already have are working well together before I bring in more bodies. New people don’t fix a broken system, they just get confused by it.

2. Generally, I’m trying to hire fewer people. If I feel like I constantly need more staff, it’s usually a sign I haven’t fixed a process problem yet.

3. Most people won’t actually read the job description (seriously). So I added a hidden line asking them to include a specific, random phrase like “I love marketing” in the first sentence of their email or cover letter. It’s a super quick way to filter out the lazy ones.

4. I now share the salary right away. It’s the easiest way to immediately screen out expensive folks. Trust me, I am not a world-class negotiator, and it saves everyone a ton of wasted time later.

5. Those old take-home tests? Totally useless now, thanks to AI. I’ve realized I need to test how smart they are on the fly, not how well they can cheat a weekend assignment.

6. Publishing an extremely transparent company handbook is like cheating. It makes it so clear what the job is and what the culture is like, and only the right people apply.

7. I learned that because hiring is so critical, I really needed to handle it in-house. Outsourcing recruitment early on meant I was essentially outsourcing my company’s culture, and that’s a mistake I won’t repeat.

8. I’m done taking shortcuts because I’m tired. Hiring no one is 100% better than hiring the wrong person. Seriously, firing someone is the worst, so I make sure I say no at the interview stage.

9. I prefer candidates who can self-learn without me teaching every single thing. They need to show they can figure stuff out on their own.

10. Optimism is totally underrated. I can teach someone Python, but I can’t teach them to show up with a positive attitude when things are tough.

Anyway, that’s my brain dump. What’s your biggest recruiting nightmare been lately? Let me know!