What building a team of 27 looked like in practice

By December 2024, we'd already started hiring without any actual numbers to back it up. Applicants were coming in, interviews were happening, and I still hadn't sat down to work out how many people I actually needed, or by when. So that's what I did before the year ended: I worked backwards from a roadmap of two new markets every quarter, and landed on a target headcount and a deadline, July 2025, to get there.

That gap, hiring starting before the math existed, is a lot less rare than everyone pretends. Here's what the math actually looked like once I did it, and everything that came after.

What I built before a single interview happened

Once I had a target, I didn't just hand HR a number. I put together the job descriptions, the KPIs for each role, and a team structure with clear layers: junior writer, senior writer, team lead, and took the whole thing to management for approval before hiring properly kicked off. I still have the two presentations from that process, including org charts and expected output projections, which is really the paper trail proving this wasn't guesswork.

Getting sign-off first mattered. It meant that when HR started advertising, everyone was hiring against the same structure, not filling headcount and hoping the org chart would sort itself out later.

Where my job ended, and HR's began

The split was fairly clean, on paper. I owned the job descriptions and the final call on who moved to interview. HR owned sourcing and the first screen. In practice, that first screen was where most of my time went, because it wasn't always reliable.

HR would send through three to five CVs a day. I'd go through each one and pick the candidates I thought were actually worth an interview slot. One recurring friction point? We kept getting applicants with no prior iGaming experience through to me, which told me the initial screening wasn't catching what it needed to. That was a genuine, ongoing back-and-forth between me and HR, not a one-time correction.

Once someone was through, there was a second, smaller piece of math to do: scheduling. Time zone differences meant finding an interview slot wasn't just "pick a time," it was checking two calendars against a working-hours overlap that wasn't always generous.

What I was actually looking for in a CV

Two things mattered more than anything else: iGaming experience, and whether that experience was provable, not just claimed.

Two things reliably moved a CV to the "nope" pile. The first was anything that read as AI-generated, not because using AI is inherently a problem, but because a CV that sounds like nobody wrote it tells me nothing about how that person actually writes or thinks. The second was a CV that matched the job description almost word for word, where the actual experience described didn't line up with what the JD asked for. That pattern, language borrowed from the posting itself, dressed over a mismatch, was one of the clearest tells I found.

What the interview was actually for

I ran a single interview, deliberately casual. I wasn't trying to catch anyone out with trick questions. I was trying to get a read on two things: whether this person would actually fit the team, and whether they had genuine interest in the company, which usually showed up as whether they'd done any real research before the call. Candidates who asked interesting questions, and could hold a meaningful conversation, often moved on to the writing test that came next.

The red flags here were less about wrong answers and more about a lack of presence: candidates visibly reading responses off a screen, or people who couldn't tell me what the role actually involved, or what the company did. Those weren't disqualifying on their own, but they told me a lot, faster than any formal scorecard would have.

The test that decided most hires

Most of the hiring at this stage was for junior writers, and for that level, the writing test carried real weight. I'd give candidates a week to write either a game review or a game provider page.

What I actually evaluated wasn't just "can they write." I looked at spelling and grammar, sure, but more importantly: structure, comprehension of the brief, and whether the piece reflected genuine subject-matter knowledge, or the kind of surface-level research that falls apart if you ask a follow-up question. A technically clean piece of writing that clearly hadn't done the homework scored lower than a rougher piece that had.

Candidates whose tests met that bar got an offer. From there, onboarding picked up, which is really where the story from my last post begins.

The two weeks that tested all of it

By July, we'd grown enough to have real structure underneath me: a writer and an editor had been promoted to team lead, so the India operation was now three small teams of around four writers each. That was also when I flew out to the India office myself, partly to work more closely with HR in person and mostly to push through the final sprint of interviews and lock in the remaining hires before I flew home.

I was there for two weeks. For the first week and a half, I had back-to-back interviews, every single day. It meant, uncomfortably, that I had almost no time left to actually spend with the team that already existed, the team I'd flown out there to be closer to. That trade-off is one of the more honest things I can say about scaling fast: the work of building the next layer of the team can quietly eat the time you meant to spend with the layer you already have.

There was a genuine upside, though. It was during that stretch, between interviews, that I identified the person I felt was the strongest candidate to lead the India office day-to-day and started the actual conversation with him about stepping into that role. That decision, made in the middle of the busiest, most stretched two weeks of the whole process, turned out to be one of the best calls I made.

What this taught me about hiring at pace

None of this made hiring fast. If anything, it made it slower in the short term, checking CVs myself, running every interview personally, reading every test in detail. But it's also the reason the quality held as the team grew from 4 to 27, rather than scaling headcount and quietly losing the bar along the way.

The math at the start, markets, pages, percentages, gave me a number. Everything after that, the CVs, the interviews, the tests, was about making sure the people behind that number were actually the right ones.