Some of our hardest working team members in our portfolios are not “pedigreed” guys – tough to build a hiring process around. You just have to see them working.

I don’t think it costs anywhere near 2 man-years of effort to do the hiring you outline; like anything else, you have to develop process around it. Next to purchasing, I think HR is the most underutilized/underleveraged function in modern business.

In most technology companies, you can give someone a one or two hour task or a “tell me what you’d do in this situation” interview that will give you as good a guess as you can get. Then use a trial period.

Play the game out a few iterations, if you really were running those odds, and it took between 4-12 weeks to weed out, a long term staff of ten would require 20 hires. (that could be 2 man years of FTE added to the rest of conventional acquisition costs) That’s and expensive way to hire, practical issues like confidentiality and non compete and leave a wake of people in your community that washed out.