A LinkedIn comment thread made me rethink my own story
Last week, a Spotlight piece about my work landed in the feeds of people I used to work with.
A bunch of cherished ex-Onfido colleagues commented. A few more recent clients too. I was genuinely grateful for it - and then I noticed something.
Most of the comments were about recruitment.
That shouldn’t have surprised me. I joined Onfido in 2016 - nearly a decade ago. Back then, I was very clearly “the recruiter”.
In that time, Onfido went from 50 people at Series B to 400 across 7 global locations in three years - and ultimately a $650m exit in 2024.
So those comments made me pause, because they pulled me back to an earlier version of myself. The one who was measured on pipeline, process, and closing. The one who could tell you exactly where every candidate was sitting and what it would take to land them.
But they also made something else obvious.
I’m not just a recruiter anymore.
And I found myself asking a question I haven’t properly answered in public: what actually changed?
Here’s the honest answer: I went from filling roles to, for the first time, helping connect the business plan to a people plan.
That wasn’t a job title change. It was a change in how I thought about the work.
The shift wasn’t instant - it emerged through proximity
This wasn’t one dramatic “aha” moment. It emerged over time.
At Onfido, trust built - through delivery, through judgement, through doing what I said I’d do. And with that trust came proximity. I was brought into conversations with Ellie Romer-Lee (my manager), Eamon Jubbawy (COO and co-founder) and the founder team.
That’s when you stop hearing hiring requests as isolated requirements and start hearing them as signals.
Because when you’re close enough to the business, you start to see that a hiring request is rarely just a hiring request. It’s usually one of these:
We have a milestone coming and we don’t have the capability to hit it.
We’ve got a bottleneck that keeps showing up and we’re trying to hire our way out of it.
We’re anxious and we want to move faster, so we’re marking everything urgent.
We’ve got too much work, not enough clarity, and no one wants to say no.
Once you see that pattern, you can’t unsee it.
And you start to realise something else: most places don’t do this. Most hiring processes don’t connect hiring decisions to business milestones with any discipline. Even very smart people fall into “shopping list hiring” the moment it gets urgent.
Candidate-side: I stopped selling a job and started selling the opportunity
Part of the shift was candidate-side.
Earlier in my career, I was doing what good recruiters are trained to do: take the requirement, translate it, go to market, close the candidate.
And you can absolutely build a career doing that well.
But the best candidates - especially in post-seed to Series B companies - aren’t joining because the job description is tidy.
They’re joining because the opportunity is real.
So I stopped selling “a job”, and got better at selling the opportunity - connecting the role to something bigger, more impactful, and ultimately the success of the company.
That changes the conversation immediately. Because you can’t credibly sell impact if you don’t understand what the business is trying to achieve next, and why this role matters now - not in theory, but in sequence.
It forces clarity. On both sides.
Internal-side: the cost of a mis-hire becomes impossible to ignore
The bigger shift was internal.
When you’re in the room with the people running the company, you stop thinking of a mis-hire as “we’ll just re-hire”.
You see the cost properly.
A mis-hire isn’t just the salary. It’s the wasted time, the effort, the management bandwidth, the knock-on decisions that get delayed, the work that gets redone, the morale hit, the opportunity cost.
And yes - it shows up in runway.
Once you take that seriously, speed stops being the default answer. Speed without sequencing is just an expensive way to stay busy.
So the job becomes: slow the thinking down, even when the business feels like it’s moving fast.
Before and after: what hiring looked like in other environments vs a scaling start-up
Before Onfido, in agency roles and places like the BBC and Government Digital Service, hiring often looked like this:
Take the requirement. Assume the hiring manager has deep clarity. Go fill it.
That model can work when the organisation is stable, roles are well-defined, and there’s a mature operating system underneath the work.
But start-ups don’t have that luxury. In a scaling company, the requirement is often a best guess. The “role” is usually a bundle of problems. And the urgency is real - but not everything urgent is important, and not everything important is urgent.
After Onfido, hiring became a conversation and a collaboration:
Diagnose the problem first. Then solve it together. Sometimes that meant hiring. Sometimes it meant not hiring.
Some people call that strategy.
I just think it’s what happens when you stop treating hiring as a service desk and start treating it as a lever.
The practical reality: urgency is usually a sequencing problem
If you’ve just raised, hiring can quickly turn into a frantic shopping list.
Everything gets labelled urgent. Everyone has a role they want next. It can look like:
“We need to hire senior GTM leadership.”
“We need more AEs yesterday.”
“We need product to move faster.”
“We need engineering capacity.”
“We need ops, CS, finance, everything.”
Most founders think the answer is speed.
But without sequencing, speed is how you waste money.
So the work becomes a simple discipline: link the hire to the milestone.
That’s the bridge between the business plan and the people plan.
These are the questions I keep coming back to:
What milestone does this hire unlock - and by when?
If you can’t name the milestone, you’re hiring on guesswork, not outcomes.What bottleneck will they own end-to-end?
Not “help with”. Not “support”. Ownership.What breaks if we wait 60-90 days - and what can we do instead?
Rescope, kill work, reassign ownership, accept the delay. But make it an explicit decision.What are we not hiring for yet - and why?
This is where you protect runway. Every yes creates a set of hidden no’s. Name them.
That last one is the hardest, because it forces trade-offs. It forces founders and leaders to be honest about what they’re prioritising now, and what they’re deliberately not doing yet.
And that’s where the people plan becomes real.
What “good” looks like when you do this properly
When hiring is genuinely connected to milestones, a few things change.
You can explain the role in plain English. Not as a set of tasks, but as a problem and an outcome.
You can sell the opportunity to candidates without over-promising, because you can articulate the impact and the context.
You reduce premature hires - roles that feel important, but don’t actually unlock the next milestone.
You protect manager bandwidth because you’re not building teams that don’t have a clear purpose yet.
You also get clearer about culture - not as a vibe, but as behaviours.
At Onfido, we recruited for culture fit, but not in the lazy sense. Culture was articulated by values and behaviours we crafted as a company. You could point to what it meant in day-to-day work.
That matters because in fast growth, you make decisions with imperfect information. Shared behaviours reduce chaos and help the company move as one.
The takeaway I’m sitting with
That LinkedIn comment thread reminded me that people often anchor you to the role they first knew you in.
Recruitment is where I started, and it’s still a core skill I’m proud of.
But the work I do now sits one layer upstream.
It’s helping founders and operator leaders connect the business plan to a people plan - so hiring becomes a deliberate sequence of bets that unlock milestones, rather than a frantic shopping list that burns runway.
If you’ve just raised and everything feels urgent, what would change if you mapped your next three hires to milestones before you open a single role?