The Hiring Archetype
Framework

You've read the CV. The experience is solid. The portfolio is impressive. The interview goes well. Three months later, something isn't working.

The problem is rarely skill. It's rarely experience. It's something harder to name — the way a person thinks under pressure, how they handle ambiguity, whether they notice what others miss, whether they build or just plan, whether they challenge or just comply. Most hiring frameworks don't touch this. They measure what people know. They score what people have done. They miss who people are. This framework was built to fix that.

I've spent over two decades building and leading product and experience teams across multiple companies and over a hundred nationalities. Somewhere along the way, I stopped trusting CVs and started paying attention to behaviour. Not personality tests. Not psychometric profiles. Behaviour — the things that surface in a real conversation when someone tells you about work they care about. In 2019, I formalised what I'd been doing instinctively into a single document: 12 behavioural archetypes and a mapping to every role on a design team. It lived in an internal playbook. It was never meant for anyone else. Seven years later, I expanded it to 14 archetypes and mapped them to 31 roles across the full product and experience space. Behavioural indicators grounded in research. A system that any hiring manager can use — not just me.

Every person in a product or experience team carries traces of all 14 archetypes. The question is never which one are they — it's which ones are strongest, and whether they carry enough of the others to fill the role. Senior roles demand more range. Junior roles demand more focus. But no role can afford the complete absence of any archetype — because each one represents a fundamental way of engaging with work.

Good teams aren't built from people who agree. They're built from people whose strengths push against each other in ways that produce better work. These seven tensions are the productive ones — the pairings that create healthy friction when both archetypes are strong on the team.

These tensions are not problems to solve. They're the mechanism through which good teams produce good work.

Pick the roles you're hiring for. The tool maps each role to its required archetypes — which ones are non-negotiable, which ones are supporting, interview signals to listen for — and gives an honest assessment of where your team is strong and where it's exposed in real time. Small teams of three to five will almost always show gaps — that's realistic, not a failure. The best small teams know their gaps and compensate through awareness, not headcount.

Every interview-based assessment carries bias. The interviewer's own archetype profile influences what they notice — a strong Strategist may unconsciously favour strategic thinkers and undervalue strong Builders. This framework reduces bias by naming what you're looking for, but it doesn't eliminate it. The casual interview format works, but it's not culturally neutral — in cultures where formality signals respect, adjust the setting, not the method. And no framework replaces judgment. This one gives you a vocabulary for what you're observing and a structure for evaluating it. The final decision is still human.

This framework exists in conversation with Belbin Team Roles (the idea that every role has allowable weaknesses), the Big Five personality model (academic grounding, not assessment), competency-based hiring methodology (observable behaviours for each role), and the hire-for-attitude school of Southwest Airlines and Zappos. It's an original assembly of proven thinking, designed specifically for digital product and experience teams.

The Medium article behind this framework, including the origin, the failures, and the customer support team that became qualitative researchers.