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Hiring in 8 countries shouldn't require 8 different processes
This guide from Deel breaks down how to build one global hiring system. You’ll learn about assessment frameworks that scale, how to do headcount planning across regions, and even intake processes that work everywhere. As HR pros know, hiring in one country is hard enough. So let this free global hiring guide give you the tools you need to avoid global hiring headaches.
DEEP DIVE
I was on a call with a founder last year.
$14M ARR. Solid team. Decent churn numbers. But their growth had been flat for 8 months and he'd already burned through 2 agencies, a rebrand, a content strategy, a new sales hire, and 3 rounds of pricing experiments.
He said it like there was nothing he could do anymore:
"We've basically tried everything."
I didn't say anything right away. I was looking at his positioning doc, which hadn't changed since the company was at $3M. I was looking at his homepage which was trying to speak to 4 different buyers at once aka. to no one. I was looking at their campaigns, ads, emails, and sales decks — all of it carrying the same blurriness.
If you’re reading this and you did the same thing and you’re wondering what was actually wrong with it… This is what happened:
He hadn't tried everything. He tried 20 variations of the same (broken) thing.
Let me explain…
There's a specific kind of exhaustion that builds up in founders between $5M and $20M. It's not burnout in the classic sense. It's more like... the feeling of running full speed but not knowing if you're facing the right direction.
You've made the hires.
Run the experiments.
Read the frameworks.
Done the workshops.
Brought in the consultants.
Some things moved the needle slightly. Some didn't.
And slowly, quietly, a belief forms:
Maybe this is just hard. Maybe we've hit a ceiling. Maybe the market is tougher than we thought.
That belief is seductive because it lets you off the hook. If everything is hard, then the problem isn't solvable — it's just reality.
But that's rarely what's actually happening.
What's actually happening is that the company has been running on a positioning layer that was built for an earlier version of itself (or earlier version of your customer) and everything is layered on top of that old foundation.
The ads underperform because the message is blurry.
The sales cycle drags because the value isn't landing clearly to the customer you wanna acquire now.
The content gets decent engagement but doesn't convert, because it's attracting the wrong people with the wrong promise.
And so the founder (you) runs another experiment.
Here's the mechanism.
When a company is stuck, the natural response is to look at what's visible: the campaigns, the copy, the sales process, the team performance. These are the things you can point at in a meeting. These are the things that have line items in the budget.
So you optimize them.
You A/B test.
You hire specialists.
You try new channels.
You run Q3 with a new approach.
And sometimes it moves. A little. (Enough to justify the next experiment.)
But the actual problem — the positioning, the ICP clarity, the messaging architecture — sits one level below everything you're looking at. It's invisible because it's foundational. And foundational problems don't show up in dashboards. They show up as a pattern: the pattern where nothing quite works well enough, for long enough, at the scale you need.
The trap isn't trying too many things - it’s that you’re obsessing over the numbers without looking at the setup behind them.
The founder I mentioned earlier?
We spent the first three weeks not touching anything.
No new campaigns.
No new ideas.
Just an audit — 4 customer interviews, a website and sales deck review, talking to their sales team, looking at their ads.. And a hard look at who was actually converting and why.
Once we saw it, it was obvious.
They were selling to two totally different buyers.
Different problems. Different reasons to buy.
And for two years they had been blending them together.
So the messaging was kind of right for both. (And perfect for neither)
The rebrand didn’t fix it.
The agencies didn’t see it.
Even the new sales hire just worked around it without realizing what the real issue was!
We didn’t redesign anything. We repositioned.
And within a month, the pipeline felt different.
Not bigger - better.
The conversations changed.
The usual objections got… quieter.
And one deal that had been stuck for four months finally closed.
Because the deck finally spoke to the right person.
He didn’t need more experiments.
He needed the right diagnosis first.
If your growth has been flat for more than two quarters, and you've already run the experiments, I'd ask you one question before the next one:
What are you assuming is working that you haven't actually tested?
That question tends to find the thing hiding under all the effort.
If you want a second pair of eyes on what might be the real structural issue, reply to this email. I read every one.
See you next week,
P.S. If this landed for a founder you know - forward it. The loop is more common than anyone admits.
BEST LINKS
If this resonated read this next ✨
🧠 Structure — Your buyer already made up their mind — were you even in the running? (Medium)
🔍 Diagnostic thinking — Why every SaaS needs YouTube (Humble & Brag)
🎯 Clarity — April Dunford on why positioning has to matter to your buyer (Lenny’s Podcast)
That’s a wrap✨
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