Most companies think they know how to hire great people. Here’s why they don’t.

It starts with mission, vision, and values. Not as a poster. As a practice.

The foundation of any great employer is clarity around mission, vision, and values. Not a slide deck. Not a wall hanging in the lobby. A living, working part of how the business operates every single week.

At engin, we put our values on the screen during our weekly wrap-up. Every week. Authenticity. Earnestness. Stewardship. Aspiration. These aren’t decoration. They’re the principles by which we make decisions, hire people, and build the business. And they’re part of why, since we started the company, not a single full-time employee has quit.

Great companies talk about their mission, vision, and values constantly. They bake them into job descriptions. They make them visible at the very first touchpoint in the hiring process. They attract people who are genuinely aligned with what the company is trying to do, which means fewer mismatches, less turnover, and a team that actually moves in the same direction.

If you’re a startup or a fast-growing company, your product will change. Your go-to-market will evolve. Your pricing might shift multiple times. But your mission, vision, and values should remain stable. They’re the anchor. And if you haven’t defined them clearly yet, that’s not a soft problem. It’s the first hiring problem you need to solve.

Cultural clarity is the thing most companies skip

Building on that foundation is something I call cultural clarity, and it’s where a lot of companies stumble even when they have good values in place.

Cultural clarity means being specific, genuinely specific, about what it’s like to work at your company. Not vague. Not aspirational. Real.

Do you expect people to work a lot of hours because you’re in a competitive sprint and your team is bought into that? Say so. Is your team highly collaborative, where communication is frequent and decisions are made together? Say so. Is it remote-first, and intentional about how they maintain connection across time zones? Say so.

The reason this matters is simple: if you aren’t clear about your culture during the hiring process, people will project whatever they want onto the role, accept the offer based on that projection, and then be blindsided when reality looks different. That’s how you lose otherwise great hires in their first 90 days.

Culture fit is always going to involve some gut instinct, some vibes, as I’ve said before. You can’t fully engineer it. But you can define your culture clearly enough that you’re at least evaluating candidates against the right criteria, and so they know what they’re walking into.

Retention isn’t a perk problem. It’s a learning, earning, and fun problem.

One of the most reliable signals I’ve found for whether someone is at risk of leaving is whether I can honestly answer yes to three questions about them. Are they learning? Are they earning? Are they having fun?

Learning means they’re being challenged. They’re growing. They have a sense that their work is building toward something. People leave when they feel stuck, and no amount of free lunch makes up for feeling like you’ve hit a ceiling.

Earning is equally direct. People need to be paid competitively. If you’re hiring in a real market for real talent, you are competing against other companies for those people. The best way to find out if you’re 20% below market is to start losing people to competitors and then hear it from your recruiter. We can see that data in real time through the engin platform, and it’s never a good conversation to have after the fact. Get your third-party comp data, know where you stand, and stay ahead of it.

And having fun. I know that sounds obvious, but a lot of leadership teams underestimate it. People spend eight to ten hours a day at work. They want to enjoy it. They want to make jokes, get to know their colleagues beyond Slack messages, and feel like the environment they’re in is one worth showing up to. In remote and hybrid environments, that sense of fun and connection doesn’t happen by accident. It requires deliberate investment, whether that’s offsite gatherings, non-work Zoom calls, or just leadership making the space for people to actually connect as humans.

Dial in those three things, and the problems that most companies spend money trying to fix, Glassdoor ratings, employer brand perception, retention numbers, tend to improve on their own. You’re not reacting anymore. You’re building something that sustains itself.

Your employer brand is already telling a story. The question is whether you’re in control of it.

If your average review on Glassdoor is below 3.5 stars, the top candidates in your space are probably not applying to you. They don’t have to. They have options, and a quick search of your company name is giving them a reason to keep scrolling.

I’ve talked to hundreds of hiring managers who dismiss this. They’ll say reviews are biased, or that the people leaving bad reviews are people who were let go. And sure, some of that is true. Not every negative review reflects reality. But if there’s a consistent pattern, that pattern is signal, and top talent will treat it as such.

The way I frame this for the companies we work with is that you have a vitamin and a painkiller to address.

The vitamin is the long game. It’s investing in your current employees, getting the people who genuinely love working there to share their experience publicly, and making sure your employer brand is something you’re actively tending to over time, not just something you think about when a role is open. Our recruitment marketing team helps companies build and manage exactly this, because it has to be consistent to be credible.

The painkiller is the immediate fix. If you have a poor employer brand and need to hire now, you can’t wait for the reviews to improve organically. You have to go outbound, target proactively, and lead with a compelling narrative before a candidate ever gets the chance to see your star rating. That means personalized outreach at scale, job board optimization, and telling your story in a way that gives someone a reason to be curious before they’ve formed an impression.

But neither the vitamin nor the painkiller will matter if you don’t actually fix the underlying culture and experience issues that generated the bad reviews in the first place. Brand is downstream of reality.

The hiring process itself is where you’re losing people you already won over

A lot of companies do real damage in the actual interview process, often without realizing it.

The first sign that a company is going to be hard to recruit for is when they’re resistant to feedback. The market tells you something about your role, whether it’s compensation, title clarity, or the competitiveness of the job itself, and the great companies adjust. They either recalibrate their expectations or they increase the investment. The ones who dig in and insist they can get everything they want at the price they’ve set are the ones who end up with the role open for six months.

When candidates do get into your process, who they talk to first matters more than most people think. Typically, the first screen is with a recruiter, and that recruiter should be doing two things: asking high-level qualifying questions and actively selling the opportunity. Because from the candidate’s perspective, that first conversation is already shaping their impression of your company. Make it good.

From there, the first call with the hiring manager should be a two-way conversation. Not an interrogation. I’ve had to coach a lot of hiring managers on this, because the instinct is to jump straight into questions. But the best hiring managers start by selling. They tell the candidate why they love working there. They explain why the role exists and what success in it looks like. They create a conversation before they start evaluating.

The way I put it is this: you can’t just throw the turkey in the oven cold. Preheat it first. By the time you’ve warmed up the conversation and the candidate is open and engaged, you’ll get far more honest, revealing answers to your actual questions than you would if you started the call with a technical prompt.

And when the call ends, you should leave knowing whether you want to move this person forward, and confident that if you do, they’ll say yes. That’s the standard.

The most underrated part of the process: keeping candidates warm

Here’s something the best companies do that most people don’t talk about: they treat candidates in their pipeline the way a good sales team treats a warm lead.

Recruiting processes take time. Sometimes weeks. Sometimes months. And during that time, candidates are anxious, uncertain, and often talking to multiple companies. If you go quiet on them, they’re going to fill that silence with doubt, or with a yes to someone else.

The fix is not complicated. It’s a structured nurture sequence. A few touchpoints over the course of the process that keep the candidate informed and engaged. After the first round, send them an overview of what to expect and how long each step usually takes. A few days later, share something about your culture, a video from a recent team offsite, a piece about the company’s mission. Keep the relationship warm.

This kind of communication tells a candidate everything about what kind of company you are before they even accept an offer. First impressions compound. If your process is organized, communicative, and genuinely interested in them as people, they’re going to want to work there more, not less, by the time you get to the offer.

The companies that win the talent war aren’t always the ones with the highest salaries or the most prestigious brand names. They’re the ones that make top candidates feel like joining the team is the obvious next move.

If talent isn’t a top-three priority, you’re already behind

Here’s what I’ve seen over twenty years, across thousands of hires, in companies at every stage: the businesses that treat talent as a top-three priority from the CEO on down are the ones that build enduring, generational companies. The ones that treat it as a support function, something to manage rather than invest in, eventually hit a ceiling they can’t explain.

Every person on your team is an extension of your business. Every customer interaction they have, every decision they make, every day they show up, it’s all compounding. In the same way that a decision you made five years ago may be the reason your business succeeds or fails today, a hire you make this quarter could be the thing that changes your trajectory for the next decade.

Start with people. Build the foundation right. The rest has a much better chance of falling into place.