“From the Orb vault” is a series of previous market research, presentations, blurbs, and other conceptual writings that we will start publishing regularly, in hopes it might help shape views on the often unregarded topic of global expansion and localisation (L10N). Through these insights, we aim to shed light on the complexities and inefficiencies that many overlook in the rush to scale internationally.
Most writing on hiring treats team growth as inherently beneficial. More people are assumed to mean more output, more leverage, and more scale. In practice, each hire also adds cognitive load, coordination cost, and management risk. That cost should be justified, not assumed away.
Start from a stricter prior: every hire adds long-term organizational load and must prove its value under conservative assumptions. Use “do not hire yet” as the default position and move away from it only when evidence is strong.
Exhaust Non-Hiring Solutions First
Before opening a role, search for lower-labor designs. Adjust constraints, automate steps, improve tooling, reduce scope, or simplify interfaces. Many staffing needs come from earlier architectural shortcuts rather than true demand.
If work still needs external help, prefer narrowly scoped contractors with clear deliverables and clean interfaces. This limits coordination drag and long-term coupling.
If coordination overhead remains high, hire one high-agency generalist before building a team. Look for someone who can understand the full stack of the problem, source specialists, and integrate outputs. This only works when mutual comprehension and judgment are strong.
Small Teams Scale Better Than Large Ones
Coordination paths grow combinatorially with team size. Communication channels follow the formula n(n−1)/2. Each added person increases the chance of misalignment, context loss, and error propagation.
Quality control diffuses as ownership fragments. Local optimizations begin to conflict with system goals. Integration work moves upward and often lands with leadership. Many executives eventually find they have hired themselves into a full-time synthesis role.
Make low management overhead and end-to-end ownership explicit selection criteria.
Selection Should Be Biased Against False Positives
False positives cost more than false negatives. Passing on a strong candidate delays progress. Hiring a weak one creates an ongoing tax.
Assume a candidate is not a fit and look for decisive counterevidence. Use interview tasks that closely match real work and evaluate them like production artifacts. Ask a simple question: if this arrived during a normal work cycle, would it meet the bar?
Design early filters that are cheap to review and predictive of performance. If you can consistently produce better output than the candidate in similar time, expect ongoing review and rework load.
Surface your working style and constraints early to reduce hidden mismatches.
Salary Is Only One Component of Cost
Compensation is the most visible number and often not the dominant cost. The larger costs are supervision, coordination, error correction, priority alignment, and interpersonal load. These consume attention and decision bandwidth.
Low salary does not imply low cost. It often correlates with higher oversight needs. Model each hire as initially net negative in expected value and assign a real probability that this remains true. Hire only when the plan still works under conservative forecasts.
Design Teams as Execution Systems
You are building an execution system, not collecting impressive individuals. Role interaction, coverage, and dependency chains matter more than isolated excellence.
Prefer people who can execute end to end on bounded problems. Junior hires are viable only when mentorship capacity is explicitly allocated and teaching ability is verified. If no one owns mentorship, do not hire juniors.
For each dependent role, map the workflow clearly: required inputs, sources, quality thresholds, outputs, and consumers. Detect hidden prerequisite roles before committing.
Align Headcount With Strategy
Clarity of intent should come before hiring. Define success operationally. State which constraints are fixed and which are flexible. Share these early in the interview process to filter both sides.
Hire for direct relevance to upcoming execution. Adjacent skill and prestige are weak proxies for impact.
Plan for Adjustment Costs
Team changes create predictable turbulence. Performance dips during membership changes are structural. Plan for them.
Incremental hiring disturbs systems less than batch hiring and preserves culture more reliably. Treat growth rate as a controllable variable and include adjustment cost in your hiring calculus.
Improve Through Feedback Loops
Hiring mistakes are inevitable. Run postmortems on failures and near-misses. Identify early signals that predicted later problems and update your criteria.
Prefer sequential hires over batch expansion while your hiring model is still improving. Tight feedback loops build judgment faster.
Assume a Lifecycle
Every employment relationship has a lifecycle. Some hires exit, others become misaligned as needs change. Define success metrics and failure thresholds early and make them mutual.
Healthy arrangements converge to mutual benefit within a bounded ramp period. If not, act decisively. Delay compounds damage. Periodic renegotiation of scope and terms is normal management work.
Operating Principle
Each additional person increases organizational surface area and coordination demand. Default to fewer people than your intuition suggests, then test whether you can operate with fewer still.
Overhiring creates enduring drag. Underhiring creates temporary strain. Temporary strain is usually easier to correct.
