There's no such thing as a good hire in the abstract

There’s no such thing as a good hire in the abstract. Only the right person for your specific context. If the person you’re bringing on wouldn’t fail in another environment, you’re not being ambitious enough.

Every growing organization suffers from a profound lack of self-knowledge.

Companies have been quietly getting bigger over the last century. The need to scale demanded standardization, and therefore fungibility. Firms began to think of the people inside them as replaceable units. Even the words we use, “human resources,” “headcount,” “talent acquisition”, turn people into generic inputs rather than specific humans.

So corporations spend millions on decks that tell them who they are. They run culture surveys, leadership offsites, and hire consultants to diagnose their own dysfunction. They do all of it because they genuinely don’t know what’s working, what’s missing, and where a gap could use filling. Nowhere does this play out more expensively than in hiring.

What’s wrong with hiring today

Generically good isn’t good enough

There is no good hire that works in any company. There is only a good hire within yours.

Most companies hire like it’s a popularity contest: collecting logos and pedigree, optimizing for the candidate who looks impressive on a slide instead of the one who fits the particular shape of what they’re building.

They chase “top talent” from the same seven companies because they lack conviction in their own taste, and miss the diamond in the rough every time. The companies that hire well develop an opinionated culture and look for the person who matches it exactly. The misshapen fit that belongs nowhere else.

Two-sided marketplaces suck

A recruiter is structurally two-sided: paid by the company, nominally serving the candidate, accountable to neither.

The incentive becomes a volume game: one generic search across many clients, surface the same candidates everywhere, and collect when something eventually sticks. The middleman profits from information asymmetry without improving the outcome for anyone.

That’s why there’s no big four of recruiting. The model doesn’t compound, because precision, the thing that would make it work, requires knowing a company deeply enough that you can only do it for a handful of clients at a time.

The wrong questions get you the wrong people

Years of experience, a list of tools, and responsibilities copy-pasted from the last person who held the role.

Hundreds of thousands of people match that description. Only a few actually fit. The right engineer for a food-tech company isn’t “5+ years, strong systems background.”

It’s a strong engineer whose side hustle is reviewing hole-in-the-walls, who hacked their neighborhood restaurant’s waitlist just to skip the line, and whose infectious curiosity unlocks the team. That person exists. Most companies never find them. They lacked the tools to know what they were looking for, and the technology to scour the planet for her didn’t yet exist.

The onus is always on companies

Figuring out which company a person is a match for should never fall on the candidate.

Most people are stuck in jobs they’re an okay fit for, not a phenomenal one. The assumption has always been that fixing this is the applicant’s problem: share your experience better, apply harder.

The onus should be on companies to get opinionated about who they want, who they don’t, and to reach out to the best people directly. The most talented are out in the world building. Companies should come to them, without the nightmare of perpetually logging in.

Human motivation is a criminally underutilised asset. Reallocate people to where they’re uniquely fired up, and everyone wins.

Bullish on headhunting, bearish on headhunters

The best way to hire has existed for centuries. It just never scaled.

Someone with exceptional taste and deep context goes into the world to find the right match. Conceptually this always worked. The problem is that it’s bounded by one person’s capacity and context.

Superposition deploys an agent directly into your organization with the mission-critical role of hiring your people. It gathers the right context, who you are, what you care about, the essence of your culture, and goes out to find the perfect weirdos that belong there.

Every night it dreams, consolidating what it learned and getting more opinionated across every company it has ever worked with. It builds a taste for what great actually looks like that no single human headhunter could accumulate in a lifetime. And unlike every recruiter before it, it only works for one side: the company.

We deploy one agent that learns the soul of your company and hunts the world for the people who belong in it.We call it SuperAgent.

Define your soul, run your company

Hiring is to us what books were to Amazon. The wedge.

It’s where organizational vagueness has its most visible and expensive consequences, the place every company is forced to answer, however badly: who are we, and who do we need?

Deploying the agent means encoding the soul of your company into an entity that absorbs and builds on it. Over time it becomes the system you use to bet the chips correctly: who to hire, when, and where to deploy an agent instead of a human. Soon organizations will run on a smaller, denser core of exceptional humans working alongside a swarm of purpose-built agents.

In this world, culture is the full f****** operating system of a company. Those who define who they are with enough precision will hire humans and build agents that carry that specificity into everything they do. The ones who stay generic will get generic hires, generic agents, and generic outcomes.

So don’t be generic. Be like Roger, and get specific.