Every leader says they hire carefully. The test is what happens in month five of an open requisition with a team under pressure, because that is when bars actually get lowered and nobody records that it happened.

• A written bar, agreed before the first interview. What must be true, not a wish list. Without it, ‘good enough’ drifts with how long the seat has been empty.
• Structured interviews — the same questions, the same rubric, so you are comparing candidates rather than impressions.
• Independent write-ups before the debrief. If interviewers discuss first, the most senior or most confident voice anchors everyone.
• Someone empowered to say no whose objectives do not depend on the seat being filled — a bar-raiser, however you name it.
• A recorded reason for every hire and every rejection, because your future self needs to know whether your judgement is calibrated.

Growing a team from ten to forty in a year is a specific competence and it gets probed hard in GCC and scale-up interviews. The failure mode is not finding people — it is that the culture and the bar are set by whoever joined in the last six months, because they outnumber the people who were there before. The controls: hire ahead of the onboarding capacity rather than behind it, keep tenured engineers on panels even when it is expensive, and slow down deliberately when the ratio of new to established gets uncomfortable.