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The Ozvior Standard

A profile says where someone has been. We look at what they built.

Hiring goes wrong in two places. The role is never properly understood, so the search looks for the wrong person. Or the person is read off a document that was never designed to show capability. This is how we try to avoid both.

01

The role: five questions before we look

A job description is a record of a conversation someone else already had. It lists responsibilities, not the problem.

Before we begin a search we answer five questions. If we cannot answer them, we are not ready to look for anyone - and we will say so rather than start.

  1. The problem

    What actually needs to be solved?

    Not the title. Not the function. The specific thing that is currently not happening, or not happening well enough, and what it will look like when it is. Almost no role is written as a problem. The moment one is, the population of people who could solve it changes - often dramatically, and often in a direction the company had not considered.

  2. The context

    What kind of environment will this person enter?

    Twelve people or eight hundred. A founder in the code or a founder in the boardroom. A team in one room, or one split across Bengaluru and San Francisco with six hours of overlap and a standup nobody enjoys. Strong people fail in the wrong context routinely, and it is almost never recorded as a context failure - it is recorded as a bad hire.

  3. The bar

    What separates exceptional from merely qualified?

    The question most processes never answer explicitly, which is why they fall back on proxies: years of experience, the brand on the CV, the tier of the college. Those proxies are weak everywhere and they are especially weak in a market as deep as India's. We insist on evidence instead, and we write the bar down before the search - because a bar defined after the first three candidates is just a description of the first three candidates.

  4. The person

    What kind of individual will thrive here?

    Not culture fit, which usually means familiarity. Disposition: appetite for ambiguity, tolerance for unglamorous work, whether they need a defined mandate or are energised by its absence, how they behave when the roadmap changes in week three. These are observable, and they predict success far more reliably than pedigree.

  5. The trajectory

    Why would an exceptional person choose this?

    The hardest question, and the one companies are most reluctant to sit with. Someone genuinely strong has options, is usually well paid, and is rarely unhappy. The offer has to be a better version of their next five years, not a better salary. If a company cannot articulate that honestly, we would rather resolve it before the search than watch it collapse at the offer stage.

02

The person: three things behind every profile

Once the role is understood, the judgement moves to people - and a CV is a poor instrument for it. Two people can describe the same work in the same words and be separated by an enormous distance in what they actually did.

So we read three things, and we look for evidence of each.

  1. The credentials

    What is verifiable?

    Where someone has worked, what they shipped, what they published, what they own. The necessary starting point - and the part everyone already has. It tells you someone was in the room. It does not tell you what they did there.

  2. The problems solved

    What was actually hard, and who did the hard part?

    The specific problem, the constraints, what was tried first and why it failed, what they would do differently. This is where a conversation separates people whose CVs are identical. Someone who solved it can go three questions deep without effort. Someone who stood next to it cannot go two.

  3. The context

    Under what conditions?

    Team size, stage, budget, autonomy, whether the system existed or had to be argued into existence. The same sentence on two CVs can describe a year of original work or a quarter of maintenance. Context is what tells them apart, and it is almost never written down.

What we look for in people

  • Evidence over pedigree. What someone has built, and how hard it genuinely was.
  • Depth in something. A person who has gone properly deep in one area can go deep in another; a person who never has may not have learned how.
  • Judgement under ambiguity. The instinct to define a problem before solving it.
  • Ownership that predates permission. Work taken on because it needed doing, not because it was assigned.
  • Honesty about their own limits. It correlates with almost everything else.

Talk to us

Let's find the right fit.

Tell us what you are building and the role you need to solve. If it is a fit, we will take the search. If it isn't, we will say so.

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