Hiring is one of the most important aspects of building a company; it can set a team on a parabolic trajectory or quietly stall its growth. Teams approach their hiring strategy carefully, leading to hiring strategies that are diverse and dynamic.
Small teams often rely on familiar faces, former colleagues, or trusted connections. Larger teams turn to recruiters to manage volume. At the enterprise level, hiring might become a top-down process defined by specific requirements and qualifications. The information needed for these different approaches naturally differs: small teams may prioritize basic details like source, referral, and projects; growing teams begin to focus on years of experience and previous employers; mid-sized companies and enterprises emphasize qualifications, structured evaluations, and prior experience.
Unfortunately, most of today’s leading hiring tools, many built decades ago, were not designed for this level of flexibility. Instead, they follow a lowest-common-denominator model with rigid hiring roles and outdated processes. But hiring is far more nuanced than that. The right hiring process is the one that works for the team, and the right tool should reflect that dynamism, enabling, strengthening, and simplifying each team’s unique way of hiring.
We believe this ethos cannot be retrofitted into existing systems. Attempts to do so have only created more complexity, poorer candidate experiences, and fragmented collaboration, leaving teams to spend weeks or months learning a tool and reshaping their hiring strategy around it instead of the other way around. This has led to hiring being regarded as one of the most frustrating and difficult parts of building a company.
This is why we are building Ornelle, an enjoyable way to build great teams with flexibility, personalization and intelligence at its heart.
Other areas of building a company, like sales and project management, have powerful, modern tools that have evolved to help teams move faster and simplify work. Hiring deserves the same level of craftsmanship and thought. We’re building it.