About – Berlin
Konstanty
Sliwowski
Hiring educator. Berlin. Twenty years in the room.
- Base
- Berlin
- In practice
- 20+ years
- Interviews
- 12,000+
- Decisions lived with
- 1,000+
- Cohort size
- Five
Twenty years in hiring – 12,000 interviews and more than a thousand decisions lived with. The work is small-cohort, live-role, and built so a manager can still explain a call six months later.
I have run something like twelve thousand interviews and lived with a thousand hiring decisions. The second number is the one that taught me anything. You find out what an interview was worth about eighteen months later, when the person is either doing the job or quietly leaving it.
Most of my career was spent building teams inside companies growing faster than their processes – first from the recruiting side, then from the inside, in the room where the decision actually gets made. The same three failures kept turning up: a role nobody had defined, an interview improvised that morning, and a decision made in a corridor by whoever was most certain.
I do not teach charisma or gut feel. Gut feel is memory you cannot audit, and it is confidently wrong about people who are unlike you. I teach a method: define the role, gather evidence against it, and decide against a standard you wrote down before you met anyone.
Cohorts stay at five because this is taught the way surgery is taught – on real cases, watched closely, with someone willing to tell you your question was bad. I am based in Berlin and the work happens wherever your roles are.
A hire is a prediction. The work is making the prediction checkable.
Where I am useful
- First senior hires, where being wrong costs a year.
- Panels that keep disagreeing without knowing why.
- Teams growing faster than the process that got them here.
- Leaders who inherited hiring along with the title.
Where I am not
- Filling a pipeline. I do not source and I do not place.
- Culture-fit theatre.
- Employer branding.
- Being talked into a candidate the evidence does not support.
If you are hiring something that matters, start with the role.
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