How Faire built a $13B business with ruthlessly disciplined hiring
Faire, a wholesale marketplace connecting independent retailers to small brands, has built a $13 billion business over the last 8 years. Founded in 2017 by ex-Square employees, they've grown to serve over 700k independent retailers and 100k brands as of March 2024, shaping modern retail culture by empowering rise of “shoppy shops”.
Equally as impressive is the rate at which they’re producing founders – more than 8% of their product managers go on to start companies (despite Faire being one of the youngest companies on Lenny's list tracking this metric).
Curious about their strong talent pipeline, I dove into Faire's hiring playbook to see whether their talent principles could be followed by other startups, too.
What I discovered was a disciplined, strategy-driven approach.
The Mission-Outcomes-Competencies framework
At the heart of Faire's hiring process is what CEO Max Rhodes calls a "mission-outcomes-competencies document." He explains, on Harry Stebbings’ 20VC podcast, that this isn't your standard job description. Instead:
"You write what are you hiring this person to do in a couple of sentences. What are the outcomes in the next 12-18 months you want this person to drive? Try to be as narrow and specific as you possibly can."
This level of specificity is uncommon but powerful – there are often thousands of subject matter experts, and maybe hundreds among them who could be a great culture fit. But, as Rhodes puts it, you want to “pinpoint the one candidate out there who is differentiated in their ability to do the job you want them to do.” This means that first, you want get as specific as possible regarding what your organization truly needs in this role.
For a product leadership role, Faire once identified their primary desired outcome as hiring, training, and retaining exceptional product people. This singular focus shaped everything from the job requirements to the interview questions.
Digging deeper with behavioral interviews
After someone passes the recruiter screen, Faire conducts what Max calls "deep behavioral interviews" to assess how candidates handle specific situations.
"This means taking 1-2 hours to go through every chapter of a person's professional career." These interviews are structured explorations of a candidate's entire career journey, designed to uncover how they've managed challenges relevant to the role's core needs.
It’s hard to glean this information off resume bullet points alone. You want to dig into specific scenarios as well as bigger-picture narratives to map a candidate’s experience, strengths, goals against the criteria you’ve set up in the mission-outcomes-competencies framework.
"You're asking, 'Does this person actually have the core competencies they're going to need in order to create the outcomes you're hiring this person to produce?'"
Avoid the "falling in love" trap
Perhaps the most valuable insight from Max is his warning about confirmation bias:
"The big mistake I'd use to make is that I'd fall in love with candidates. I'd get enamored with candidates and move into confirmation bias mode; I'd ignore any red flags and focus on the positives. I'd get other people excited about the candidates so other people have the same sort of blindness.”
Many of Faire’s early hiring errors stemmed from this.
If you're an early-stage founder, your hiring committee is likely very small. This creates an environment where a co-founder's biased opinions can easily sway the end result, compared to a team with multiple diverse and qualified decision-makers involved in each round. The smaller your team, the more bias-conscious you need to be.
The solution? To build an incredibly disciplined and deliberate process, which you can use to prevent yourself from getting carried away with any one candidate.
What you can implement: Faire’s four pillars of successful hiring
Max outlines Faire’s key requirements for a successful search:
1. Volume at the top of funnel
You can’t make an informed decision about a role after meeting one or two candidates. It’s important to have "enough top-of-funnel candidates submitted so you can get calibrated."
Faire uses external talent partners like executive search firms. Many early and growth stage startups partner with Paraform to access multiple expert recruiters and their networks, to get a much larger top-of-funnel influx of high-caliber candidates.
2. Ruthless prioritization
"Being crystal clear on what you really, really must have on the job, and not getting distracted by all the nice to haves." This strategy-driven approach prevents compromise on core needs.
3. Structured evaluation
Establishing a framework – and sticking to it – minimizes situations where interviewer biases sway decisions.
"Build a structured interview process that includes work exercises that test aptitude, deep behavioral interviews that dig into whether this person has done the things you need them to do and has the strengths you need them to have, and references to round it out."
4. Get thorough references
"Have 5-7 references for senior roles. Keep digging until you find something that can be considered bad. And ask, are any of the bad things dealbreakers for the things you really need for the role."
It can be tempting to quickly move a candidate forward if they have prestigious logos and you’re worried about competing offers. Many founders who are building teams for the first time see references as a quick last step to tick off, rather than a crucial part of the hiring process. But something you can learn in a few minutes from a reference can take you months to discover as a employer/teammate, making references the lowest-risk indicator of someone’s actual performance apart from work trials.
Steal Faire’s reference check questions
Max always asks references three specific questions:
- "What are the weaknesses this person has when you were working with them?"
- "On a scale of 1-10, how were they performing when they were working with you? Why?" Create a composite score across references. If they're getting 7s across the board, that's a red flag.
- "This person mentions [insert a quality the candidate mentioned that you are most concerned about] as a weakness in their interview. Can you tell me more about that?"
The next time you're trying to fill a critical role, ask yourself: Do you know precisely what outcomes you need from this hire, both in the short and longer term? Are you using a structured process to evaluate candidates against those needs?
Or are you quick to fall in love with impressive backgrounds and charismatic personalities, making you more likely to throw tested evaluation criteria out the window?
The difference, and the rigor you bring to hiring today, influences your company’s product, focus, and success for the years to come.
Start your search today.
Speak with our team to learn more about how Paraform can help you fill your difficult positions