How to avoid bad hires in early-stage startups

This week on TechCrunch’s founder-focused podcast Build Mode, Isabelle Johannessen is joined by Sarah Lucena, CEO and co-founder of Mappa, a behavioral intelligence platform that uses voice AI to decipher human behavior in under 60 seconds.

Lucena came up with the idea for Mappa after trying to start a marketing team but kept feeling like she had made the wrong hire. “And it was very frustrating because I was hiring for what I thought were the right skills, and they looked great on paper, but they weren’t useful in practice,” Lucena said.

She learned firsthand that hiring is typically based on indicators of success such as college degrees, previous work experience, and intuition. But she knew there had to be a better way. So she developed Mappa and spent years building her own dataset based on hundreds of interviews. This allows her team to analyze behavior based on biomarkers shown by people’s speech patterns. Through this process, the Mappa team discovered that making the right hire the first time requires more than just good candidates on paper. They also need to be compatible.

“There are no traits that are inherently good or bad. What matters is what kind of environment you put the person in and what role suits their tendencies and style. So that’s how we’ve been thinking about defining compatibility,” Lucena said in a podcast interview.

Mappa is backed by an all-Latino team who know how frustrating it is to be ignored based on superficial bias or lack of the “right” experience. She describes them as vulnerable people who understand the issue on a personal level.

“We’re all underdogs. We’re all people who have been ignored to some degree. I think that’s why it’s even more important that we’re building this,” Lucena said. “It’s going to allow people like us to build this technology at the level that we’re doing it, to the quality that we can bring to market, and to serve our customers the way we do. It also opens the door for others to come in and see that there are still multiple ways to build technology.”

Lucena’s best advice for early-stage founders in the hiring process is to take the time to ensure compatibility from the beginning to avoid the hassle of hiring, firing, and rehiring in the same role.

Isabel Johannessen is our host. Build Mode is produced and edited by Maggie Nye. Audience development is led by Morgan Little. And a special thanks to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams.