Recentering the Humanity in Hiring
Workplace 2.0 Vol. 1, Ed. 2: Bandsplaining a Good Team
Behind my workspace at home hangs this portrait of Beth Gibbons. I have thought about how intensely private she is. A bit different from the narcissists I wrote about in The Scheme on Monday. So I was excited to see the latest episode of Bandsplain come out today—a 4 hour discussion of Portishead’s origins in Bristol. But what does Beth Gibbons and Bandsplain have to do with hiring?
What makes these bands special is the alchemy of different kinds of people.
Yasi Salek, Host of Bandsplain
When we’re hiring—whether actual W2 employees or 1099 contractors—we’re building a team. And teams require alchemy: different perspectives, different skills, different ways of seeing. But somewhere along the way, we started optimizing hiring for efficiency instead of humanity.
Social media was the first poison, contracting our openness to others by reducing people to profiles, curated highlights, and professional personas. Sprinkle a little AI into your hiring mix, and you’ve got a recipe for sterile sameness.
Alchemy is messy. It requires friction, difference, the unexpected collision of perspectives. You can’t algorithm your way to it. You can’t automate chemistry.
But here’s the paradox: alchemy needs a container. Without structure—clear hiring processes, defined roles, grounded leadership—the mess becomes chaos instead of creative tension. The work is building containers strong enough to hold the alchemy without crushing it.
Humanity is one of the hardest parts of being an entrepreneur. In recent years, we've confused creating structure with being controlling. Or we've swung the other direction, becoming so enmeshed with our teams that boundaries dissolve. AI feels like a lifesaver because it promises to remove the messy human part entirely. Oh, the mental load this will relieve if I don’t have to psychologically engage with humanity!!
This isn’t to knock AI as a tool; it’s to highlight how it’s being misused. Instead of using AI to flatten humanity, as this NYT article describes, use it to help you create your container. Then do the human work yourself. That container includes:
Having a clear job description for the role
Having a clear job posting for the role (different from the full job description)
Having a clear interview protocol and process to follow
Having inspired questions that open dialogue about performance and culture
Having a clear onboarding and training protocol supported by standard operating procedures that take the guesswork out of how to function within your company
Having the courage to communicate with someone when you feel things are off track
And having the respect to reinforce when they are rising to the occasion
AI can be a profoundly helpful tool to help you build this container, the structure that holds both you and your team. But if you’re outsourcing your thinking about how to evaluate someone based on a few bullet points and an algorithm, you have a much deeper reflection to sit with.
Here’s what Yasi taught me about building a team—the alchemy that made Portishead extraordinary wasn’t efficiency or predictability. It was Geoff Barrow’s hip-hop sensibility colliding with Beth Gibbons’ raw vulnerability and Adrian Utley’s jazz background. It was three people who shouldn’t have worked together on paper, held in a container of shared vision and deep respect. (PS Geoff and Beth met at a free business class - lol ;)
That’s what hiring should be. Not finding the perfect algorithmic match. But creating a strong enough container—clear roles, processes, values—that different kinds of people can come together and create something none of them could have built alone. That’s the work in hiring, too. Stay human. Build the container. Let the alchemy happen.