Hire Slow: The Three-Stage Senior Interview
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Cookson treats the interview process as paramount because the cost of a wrong senior hire compounds: someone existing has to train them and leaves the game for weeks, you pay a salary for a person sitting there, they can turn a department's culture toxic, and then you have to unwind the employment — painful for everybody. His answer is a deliberate three-stage sequence for directors and senior managers. Stage one tests fit and feel. Stage two is question-based on the role, deliberately probing sensed weaknesses and pressure. Stage three is bespoke: a real, scoped piece of work handed over with a week to prepare, presented back live and then interrogated. Candidates who decline the task are self-selecting out, which is itself the signal. Half a day more of interviewing is never the expensive part.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Price the cost of a bad hire before you start
Write out what a wrong senior hire actually costs: training time pulled from an existing employee, salary for someone underperforming, cultural damage across a department, the exit process, and the disruption to the candidate's own life. This is what justifies moving slowly.
Watch out In a small business a single wrong senior hire is devastating; in a large one it can still be toxic.
- 2
Stage one — fit and feel
Run an informal first conversation. Cookson describes it as 'how are you doing?' — does it feel right, are the initial boxes ticked, is there any basis for a working relationship. No deep technical probing yet.
- 3
Stage two — challenge the weaknesses you sensed
Make the second interview question-based and specific to the role. Wherever stage one gave you a read on what they were good at and not good at, challenge them directly on it. Ask the awkward questions and watch how they handle the pressure.
Pro tip Your stage-one instinct about their weak spot is the agenda for stage two — write it down immediately after the first meeting.
- 4
Stage three — set a bespoke, real piece of work
Create a genuine scoped brief tied to what they will actually do. For a marketing director Cookson handed over a real new product — ingredients, target customer, no name yet — and said: over to you, create a marketing campaign and name it. Give them about a week.
Pro tip Deliberately leave something undefined, like the product name, so you see how they think, not just how they execute.
Watch out Do not substitute a generic case study. The whole point is that the brief is bespoke to your business.
- 5
Have them present it live, then interrogate it
Bring them in to present the work in person, then follow up with further questions around it. You are testing depth of thinking under challenge, not the polish of the deck.
- 6
Treat refusal as the answer
Some candidates will not do the task because it is a real amount of unpaid work. Cookson's read: then they are probably not right for this business, because you want people who get stuck in. Passion is the filter the task applies for you.
Pro tip You will know after they present whether it is right — for a scope of work that specific, the answer is rarely ambiguous.
Watch out Do not chase or discount the task for a candidate who pushes back on doing it; you are overriding the signal you designed.
In the wild
When Cookson was employing his marketing director at Myprotein, the final stage was a bespoke brief built from a real product. He handed over a bedtime formula — a blend of slow-digesting milk proteins with added amino acids like glutamine, aimed at stopping catabolic effects overnight — with the ingredients and the target customer, but deliberately no product name. The instruction was simply: over to you, create a marketing campaign and name it. The candidate had a week, went away, did the work, then came in and presented it live before being questioned further on the thinking. Cookson hired a marketing director who, in his words, took an area he was already good at to another level.
→ A senior hire who elevated marketing beyond the founder's own ceiling.
Ali Abdaal describes having ten writers to assess and instinctively wanting to get through their trial tasks as fast as possible. Hearing Cookson's point that an extra half-day spent interviewing pays dividends, he immediately recognised the speed as a false economy. Applying the three-stage structure would mean a short fit call, a second conversation probing whatever gap the first exposed, and a bespoke commissioned piece — a real brief from the actual content pipeline — presented and defended rather than silently submitted. The writers unwilling to do that depth of preparation filter themselves out before they ever reach the payroll.
→ Slower shortlisting, but hires screened on demonstrated work rather than CV impressions.
Common mistakes
Speeding up assessment to save time
Cookson calls compressing the interview process a false economy: half a day more spent on assessment is trivial against the cost of unwinding a wrong employment. The saving is measured in hours, the loss in months of salary, training drag, cultural damage and a painful exit where, as he puts it, nobody is a winner.
Skipping the bespoke work stage
The first two interviews only test rapport and how someone talks about a role. The third stage is where you see actual output for your actual business. Without it you are hiring on impression, and you lose the passion filter that comes from watching who is and is not willing to do a week of real preparation.
Not knowing what good looks like in the role
Ali raises exactly this problem — how do you hire an operations or finance director when you know nobody good in that function. Cookson's answer is that the bespoke scope of work resolves it: give them a full brief for the role and you will know from how they present it. The task substitutes for expertise you do not yet have.
From the transcript
“just hire very slowly. If you rush hiring it's the wrong person, it's just so devastating especially for a small business.”
“In terms of senior managers, directors, I used to use three-step process.”
“If they've not got all the passion there, they're not right.”
From the episode
How To Bootstrap £500 into £350 Million - Oliver Cookson Founder of Myprotein
Oliver Cookson