DOSSIER
Maya Chen
Head of People, Lattice
We built the whole playbook around one question nobody was asking.
Jerome Williams
Chief People Officer, Figma
Culture is the thing you build when nobody is watching the handbook.
Priya Nair
Talent Lead, Notion
I stopped trusting résumés the day I hired our best engineer from a Reddit thread.
The story starts with a thrown laptop.
I was reading another "day in the life of a CHRO" feature — the kind that gets 40,000 LinkedIn reposts — and I couldn't find a single sentence that felt true. It was all frameworks with no friction. Best practices with no blood on the floor.
I'd been in people ops for eleven years at that point. I'd made decisions that ended careers — mine included, twice. I'd watched founders override carefully built hiring processes on a gut feeling and sometimes been wrong to push back. None of that made it into any publication I could find.
So I started calling people. Not for quotes. For the real version. Dossier is what happened when they actually picked up.
Sarah Okonkwo
Founder, Dossier
Every issue, a
confession.
These are the conversations that don't make the conference keynote. They make the newsletter.
Darius Osei
VP People, Stripe
"The résumé is a document designed to exclude, not discover."
We removed the résumé from our first-round process. Offer acceptance went up 31%.
Amara Diallo
Chief Culture Officer, Shopify
"I deleted the whole deck on a Friday and nobody noticed for three weeks."
Culture decks are fiction. Ours was 42 slides of what we wished were true.
Kenji Watanabe
Head of Talent, Linear
"Job boards optimize for people who are looking. We wanted people who weren't."
Our best hires came from cold outreach on GitHub. Zero job boards. Ever.
Priya Nair
Talent Lead, Notion
"Signal is everywhere. Credentials are just the loudest noise."
I stopped trusting résumés the day I hired our best engineer from a Reddit thread.
Maya Chen
Head of People, Lattice
"Motivation is the only thing that compounds. Skills are just a starting point."
We built the whole playbook around one question: what does this person optimize for when nobody's watching?
Tobias Müller
People Ops Director, Personio
"Onboarding is the only time people show you exactly who they are."
We ran 6-month probation periods like they were performance reviews in disguise. They were.
Jerome Williams
Chief People Officer, Figma
"We stopped writing policies and started having conversations. Compliance went up."
Culture is the thing you build when nobody is watching the handbook.
Naledi Dlamini
HR Director, Flutterwave
"The hardest decision isn't the hire. It's the exit you should have done six months earlier."
I fired someone for the wrong reason once. I've spent five years making sure it never happens again.
What kind of people ops
leader are you, really?
Five scenario-based questions. No right answers. At the end, you'll know your archetype — and we'll send you the Dossier issue that will hit hardest.
Takes 2 minutes · No email required to start
Find Your People Ops Archetype
Five scenarios. No right answers. Pure signal.
"Your CEO wants to skip the panel interview for a VP hire because "they just know." You…"