Asher's Blog

My first business was in recruitment. I founded Gidi Jobs, which grew into one of Nigeria’s leading job boards, and the work eventually earned me recognition from the United States Department of State as a young African business leader. Even many years later, I still receive recognition for that chapter of my journey.

Conservatively, we helped more than 10,000 people find work with Nigerian businesses, most of them small and medium-sized companies. I spoke with thousands of employers. Before Gidi Jobs, my consulting work for Dangote Cement had already introduced me to hundreds of businesses. Later, I worked with companies across several industries—from interior design firms to state-government institutions—and our conversations gradually moved beyond recruitment. Employers wanted help with performance, retention, discipline and the everyday difficulty of managing people.

That experience taught me something I did not understand at the beginning: recruitment is not simply the act of filling a vacancy. It is the work of deciding who will help shape the future of your company.

A good hire does more than complete assigned tasks. The person improves decisions, raises standards and makes other people better. A bad hire does the opposite; the salary is only the visible cost. The hidden costs include delayed projects, weakened morale, management time, damaged customer relationships and the opportunities your company misses while the wrong person occupies an important seat.

This is why I now believe that the best people may appear expensive, but bad hires usually cost much more.

Your company is part of the recruitment process

Founders often speak as though finding good employees is a one-sided search. We describe the skills, discipline and loyalty we want, then complain that good people are difficult to find. But recruitment is a two-way evaluation. While you are assessing the candidate, the candidate is assessing you.

Can this leader be trusted? Does this company keep its promises? Will excellent work be recognised? Is there room to grow? Will I be given responsibility, or will somebody supervise every minor decision I make? Does the business have a meaningful future?

You can occasionally be a poor leader and still attract an excellent person, but you are unlikely to keep that person for long. The quality of talent a business retains eventually reflects the quality of the environment its leaders have created.

This is the chicken-and-egg problem of recruitment: good companies attract good people, and good people help build good companies. It is therefore not enough to improve your interview process. You must improve the company into which you are hiring.

Do not confuse confidence with competence

After thousands of interactions with candidates and employers, I developed a reasonably good instinct for spotting strong people. But instinct should never be the entire hiring system. Interviews can reward confidence, similarity and good storytelling. None of those qualities automatically proves that a candidate can perform the work.

In Work Rules!, Laszlo Bock explains why Google moved towards structured interviews and work samples instead of depending on conversational chemistry. The principle is simple: ask candidates for the same role substantially similar questions, define what good answers look like in advance, and give them a realistic sample of the work.

Research in personnel selection supports that approach. Work samples and structured interviews are generally more useful than an informal conversation in which every candidate is asked something different. The lesson for an African SME is not that it needs Google’s recruitment department. It is that even a five-person company can replace guesswork with evidence.

Before interviewing anyone, write a scorecard containing:

• the results the person must achieve in the first six to twelve months;
• the capabilities required to achieve those results;
• the behaviours the company will not compromise on;
• a few questions that every serious candidate will answer; and
• a short, relevant and respectful work sample.

If you are hiring a salesperson, ask the candidate to prepare for and conduct a sales conversation. If you are hiring a finance leader, present a simplified set of accounts and ask what concerns them. If you are hiring a product manager, give the candidate a customer problem and observe how they frame it. Do not ask people to complete days of unpaid work or solve a live company problem for free. The exercise should be proportionate, ethical and designed to reveal how the person thinks.

You are not searching for the person who performs the best interview. You are searching for evidence that the person can perform the job.

Great people have disproportionate impact

People sometimes say that an A player is ten or twenty times better than a B player. I understand the idea, although I would not present the number as a universal law. The difference depends on the role. Ten warehouse workers cannot necessarily be replaced by one extraordinary warehouse worker. But in work involving judgment, creativity, software, leadership or sales, one exceptional person can create disproportionately more value than an average performer.

McKinsey has reported that high performers can be substantially more productive than average performers, with the gap becoming especially large in highly complex roles. That agrees with what many founders learn in practice: the more consequential the decisions attached to a role, the more expensive mediocrity becomes.

Great people do not merely process work faster; they identify the right work. They notice risks earlier; they ask questions that prevent waste. They create systems that allow the rest of the organisation to perform better.

This is why hiring cheaply can become one of the most expensive habits in a growing company. A founder saves money on salary but spends far more through supervision, rework, slow execution and lost revenue.

Pay is not the only reason excellent people join or remain in a company. Mission, learning, leadership, flexibility and meaningful ownership matter. But founders should not use purpose as an excuse to underpay people. If a role creates significant value, the compensation should acknowledge it. Pay as well as the economics of the business responsibly permit, review compensation as the company grows, and make the whole proposition clear: salary, incentives, equity where appropriate, learning, authority and the quality of problems the person will be allowed to solve.

Stop hiring for obedience

One reason some leaders settle for weaker employees is that weaker employees can feel easier to control. They rarely challenge the founder; they wait for instructions. They make the leader feel important.

But obedience is not excellence. I now look for people who can push me. I want someone who can say, “Why are we not doing this?” or, “There is a better way to solve this problem.” I want people who arrive with an A-game record and who have already demonstrated high standards somewhere else.

This does not mean hiring arrogant people or creating a company in which everyone argues without accountability. A strong employee should challenge ideas with evidence, commit once a decision has been made and accept responsibility for the outcome. The leader must also be secure enough to hear a better idea without treating it as insubordination.

If you hire only people who agree with you, you have multiplied your hands but not your intelligence.

Give ownership before demanding ownership

Founders regularly tell employees to “think like owners” while denying them the information, authority and rewards that make ownership possible. That contradiction eventually becomes obvious.

Ownership begins when the employee understands the outcome, has enough authority to pursue it and knows where the boundaries are. It grows when leaders share context instead of issuing unexplained instructions. It becomes credible when excellent contribution is recognised and, where appropriate, employees participate financially in the value they help create.

Micromanagement may occasionally be necessary around a critical launch, a serious control failure or a new employee who needs close guidance. It should not become the permanent operating system of the company. If somebody’s ordinary work must be monitored minute by minute indefinitely, one of three things is probably wrong: the expectations are unclear, the person has not been equipped, or the hiring decision was wrong.

Give good people room to make decisions. Allow them to make recoverable mistakes. Review the work and the outcome, but do not remove all judgment from the role and then wonder why the employee shows no initiative.

Retention starts on the first day

You should be thinking about retaining a great person from the moment you decide to hire them, not when they submit a resignation letter.

Retention is built through ordinary acts repeated over time: paying when you said you would pay, giving honest feedback, keeping commitments, addressing poor performance fairly, recognising progress and not changing the rules whenever it benefits the founder.

In The Speed of Trust, Stephen M. R. Covey argues that trust changes the speed and cost of work. When trust is high, people spend less time protecting themselves, interpreting hidden motives and seeking approval for every action. In a company, that means faster execution. When trust is low, even talented people become cautious.

The strongest employees have options. They are usually the first to leave a company whose leadership cannot be trusted, and their departure creates another problem: the organisation develops a reputation for losing its best people. Future candidates notice. Former employees talk. Recruitment becomes harder and more expensive. Trust is therefore not a soft benefit; it is recruitment infrastructure.

Great people want consequential problems

One pattern I have noticed is that strong people enjoy difficult problems. They are not searching for chaos, but they want work that requires judgment and produces visible value. A company that removes every challenge in the name of retention may accidentally bore its best employees.

Give people problems worth solving. Explain why the problem matters to the customer and to the business. Let them see the result of their work. Create a path through which increased capability leads to increased responsibility.

The founder’s job is not to manufacture unnecessary emergencies. It is to convert the company’s real challenges into clear missions that capable people can own.

Career movement is a signal, not a verdict

When I hire leaders, I pay attention to the pattern of their careers. Staying long enough to build something, live with its consequences and improve it can demonstrate commitment. Constant unexplained movement may suggest that a person leaves when the work becomes difficult.

I once interviewed someone who had started a new job only a week earlier and was already looking to leave. The candidate had also worked at about two other companies within the preceding three years. I remained polite, but I knew I could not confidently bring the person into an important full-time role.

That does not mean every short tenure proves disloyalty. People leave because of layoffs, unsafe workplaces, family changes, relocation, poor leadership or a genuine mismatch between the promised job and the real one. In a volatile economy, many career histories will not be neat. Tenure must therefore open a conversation, not close the case.

Ask what the candidate was hired to accomplish, what they actually accomplished, why they left and what their former manager would say. Look for a coherent pattern of responsibility and results. Where the candidate has useful skill but the long-term fit is uncertain, a defined contract, consultancy or commission-based engagement may be wiser than immediate full-time employment. The arrangement must be honest and appropriate to the work; it should not be used to avoid lawful employment obligations.

When you cannot afford the person, redesign the arrangement

Early-stage founders in Africa frequently need first-class ability before they have the cash to pay first-class salaries. Pretending otherwise does not solve the problem. You may need to narrow the role, engage an experienced person part-time, hire a consultant to develop younger talent or find a genuine co-founder whose contribution complements yours.

A co-founder, however, is not a free employee. It is one of the most consequential relationships in the company. Put the expectations in writing. Define roles, decision rights, intellectual-property ownership and what happens if somebody leaves. Use vesting so that equity is earned over time, with carefully defined milestones where those are appropriate. Obtain legal and tax advice for the jurisdiction in which the company operates.

If the partnership is not producing the agreed contribution after a reasonable period—perhaps twelve to eighteen months, depending on the company and the work—face the evidence. Do not preserve a damaging arrangement merely because the original conversation was emotional. At the same time, do not invent new standards after the fact to deprive someone of equity they have already earned. Clarity protects both the company and the relationship.

Be decisive when the fit is wrong

I have hired someone and had to let the person go in the second month. I have also had to let leaders go. These decisions are not enjoyable, but delay rarely makes a genuine mismatch better.

Decisiveness should not mean cruelty or impatience. First ask whether the person clearly understood the job, had the resources to do it and received direct feedback. Distinguish a temporary mistake from a persistent pattern. Give a fair opportunity to improve where improvement is realistic.

But once the evidence is clear, act. A wrong person in a critical role does not affect only the founder. High performers carry the extra work; customers experience the failures. The standard of the organisation begins to fall. Keeping someone indefinitely because the conversation is uncomfortable is not kindness to the rest of the team.

As Ben Horowitz writes in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, the founder’s difficult decisions do not disappear because they are postponed. Leadership requires compassion, but compassion includes honesty.

A simple system for hiring better

My experience can be condensed into a practical sequence:

1. Define the outcome. Write what success will look like in six and twelve months before writing a long job description.
2. Separate essentials from decoration. Decide which skills and behaviours are necessary and which credentials merely look impressive.
3. Source beyond your immediate circle. The best person may not resemble the people you already know.
4. Use a structured interview. Ask comparable questions and score the evidence instead of relying on chemistry.
5. Test the work. Use a short, relevant and ethical work sample.
6. Investigate the pattern. Ask for specific achievements, difficult decisions, failures, reasons for leaving and references.
7. Sell the truth. Explain the opportunity, the constraints and the difficult parts of the job. Do not recruit with promises the company cannot keep.
8. Pay responsibly and competitively. Include the cost of a weak hire when comparing compensation options.
9. Give context and authority. Let the person own outcomes within clear boundaries.
10. Review early. Agree on 30-, 60- and 90-day expectations, give direct feedback and correct mistakes before they become habits.
11. Invest in retention. Keep promises, create growth, recognise excellence and protect trust.
12. Act when the evidence is clear. Develop people who can grow; respectfully release people who cannot succeed in the role.

The people are the company

Recruitment taught me that companies are not built by job descriptions. They are built by people making thousands of decisions when the founder is not in the room.

That is why the question is not simply, “Can we afford this excellent person?” The better question is, “What will it cost us to build this company without enough excellent people?”

Go for the best people you can responsibly attract. Pay them well. Give them meaningful problems. Trust them with real responsibility. Let them challenge you. Keep your promises to them. And when somebody is clearly wrong for the role, be honest and decisive.

The best people can look expensive on a payroll. The wrong people become expensive everywhere else. —

References and further reading

• Laszlo Bock, Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead.
• Geoff Smart and Randy Street, Who: The A Method for Hiring.
• Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
• Stephen M. R. Covey, The Speed of Trust.
• McKinsey & Company, Attracting and retaining the right talent.
• Laszlo Bock, Google’s approach to structured interviews and work samples.
• Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, “The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology,” Psychological Bulletin (1998).
• Work Institute, 2025 Retention Report.