Stop Hiring Out of Panic

Alycia M. Huston, Founder & CEO, The Culture Cru
 LinkedIn | Website: theculturecru.com | Instagram | Threads: @alyciahuston | YouTube

Alycia M. Huston spent a decade co-founding and running a biopharma company in San Diego, sold it in 2014, and stayed on through the acquisition, watching two completely different operating systems try to merge into one. Now she runs The Culture Cru, working almost exclusively with founders and small-to-medium businesses on building intentional hiring and culture from the ground up, before the org chart outruns the people in it.

This one's a masterclass in slowing down without slowing down. Alycia opens with a live story from a $25M founder client who was about to fill a VP seat out of pure urgency, until Alycia asked her one question that stopped the hire cold: does this person actually represent your mission when you're no longer in the room to reinforce it? Desiree and Alycia dig into why "urgency" and "precision" aren't opposites, why most founders think candidate experience is optional, and why one client's plan to let an AI bot handle all candidate screening ended exactly how you'd expect (spoiler: he hired Alycia three months later to clean it up).

Alycia also brings her biopharma background into the conversation in a way that actually lands, borrowing the "phased approach" from clinical trials and applying it directly to hiring: proving out each stage with data before moving to the next, instead of skipping straight to "just get someone in the seat." She and Ashley also get into candidate anchor bias (how a bad timeline promise wrecks trust before day one even starts) and the founder mindset trap of assuming everyone should already want to work for you.

In this episode:

• Why urgency and precision aren't in conflict, and how founders confuse "fast" with "right"
• The one question Alycia asks founders before they make a hire out of panic
• What she took from clinical trial "phased approach" and "preparatory research" and brought into hiring and culture work
• Why 60% of the founders she's worked with in the last six months still don't prioritize candidate experience
• The AI-bot screening story that ends about how you'd expect
• Why 80% of Alycia's actual work ends up being culture work, not hiring work
• How to diagnose a culture that's already broken (and why "listening" is a skill most talent people think they have and don't)
• The founder mindset trap: assuming everyone should already want to work for you
• Ashley's Talent Outside the Box segment on the psychology of cohort-style onboarding and retention

Resources/Links:

• The Culture Cru: theculturecru.com
• The Culture Constellation (Alycia's newsletter)
• Book: Leadership is a Practice, Not a Personality — out October 2026
• Talentless at RecFest USA and HR Tech Conference this fall