Valentina Drofa, Co-Founder and CEO at the PR firm for eminent finance and fintech brands Drofa Comms.
When putting together teams, any business naturally wants to secure professionals who can deliver results and drive growth. As such, it seems like an obvious choice to hire people with impressive resumes, and everything else can fall into place from there. But is that really true?
Throughout my own company’s growth journey, we followed multiple approaches to hiring, often with varying effects. At first, we would bring in junior employees, hoping to train them into specialists who fit our needs, but it didn’t work very efficiently. We poured time, money and energy into training them up but still faced high turnover rates. Why? Because we lacked a structured onboarding program. New hires often felt lost, unsure of expectations or how to integrate with the rest of the team. Some left due to uncertainty, while others because they didn’t see a clear path for growth within the company.
Without a clear system or formalized process in place, your hiring strategy can become fragmented. Building a strategy from scratch involves a lot of trial and error, and without a roadmap for employee development or a proper support environment, even the most promising hires can struggle to find their footing.
Readjusting Hiring Practices
Eventually, we concluded that our approach at the time wasn’t sustainable and that we needed a different way to build our team. I asked the founders of larger companies what had transformed their businesses, and their answers were often centered around the same ideas: namely, hiring the right HR leadership and developing structured talent strategies.
The first thing you want to do is test your existing team to identify what makes someone a “super-manager” in your company. You can implement testing based on the Belbin methodology, as we did, to understand how both your existing team members and new candidates could function in your company, as well as discover what the ideal image of a candidate looks like to you. The main goal here should be to identify the skills and personality traits that align with your corporate values and work culture.
From there, work to restructure your hiring process. This could mean moving away from resumes and past experiences and focusing instead on whether the candidates have the right mindset. For instance, we began to introduce practical problem-solving assessments as part of the interview process—real-life scenarios that mirrored the challenges they could encounter working in our company. Seeing how they go about solving these assignments gave us valuable insight into how compatible the candidates were with our team.
This approach helped us achieve a much smoother level of integration for new hires, who now understand what to expect from the get-go. This allowed us to reduce the time needed for their onboarding, enabling them to start showing initiative and producing results faster. This shouldn’t be about filtering out those who wouldn’t fit but rather ensuring proper alignment between you and your candidates.
Creating A Culture Of Continuous Learning And Support
But hiring the right people is only one part of the equation. Retaining them is just as important. To truly build a high-performing team, you need to cultivate an environment that promotes continuous learning and development. This is something that I myself have supported for years now. Even the most flexible employees can stagnate if the company doesn’t provide opportunities for growth.
One consideration is to implement a structured education program. We, for example, decided to introduce a remote learning platform with tailored courses and assessments, given that a lot of our work is done remotely. This helped our employees continuously expand their skills without disrupting their daily work. Each employee has a structured individual growth plan with clear goals and milestones, assigned mentors and periodic reviews to ensure progress.
On a more individual level, your HR team can start conducting regular check-ins to measure employee satisfaction and make a conscious effort to support your team. If someone among your employees is struggling, they can listen and try to find solutions to help them.
All these initiatives have had a measurable impact on our team—members feel more engaged, and employee retention has significantly improved.
Why Mindset Matters More Than A Resume
Looking back, I can confidently say that my perspective on hiring has changed a lot over the years. Experience still matters, but it’s no longer the deciding factor. The quality of an employee isn’t determined by how well they fit the job description on paper or on day one in the work chair. What truly makes someone invaluable is how well and how quickly they can learn and adapt to their new environment, becoming an active part of the team.
So, if you’re making a hiring decision, ask yourself: Are you looking for the best resume or the best mindset? Because, in the long run, the latter will make all the difference.
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