Aki Taha is a talent strategist, advisor, and the founder of TalentStories, where he helps startups and leaders build hiring, storytelling, and talent systems that compound. He brings deep operational experience from Google, Uber, and Netflix, where he led talent acquisition and built high-performing teams during the companies' earliest, hypergrowth stages in Asia. Based in Singapore, he writes a weekly newsletter on navigating modern careers and runs a community of mid-career professionals keen to build career resilience.

Hiring is full of complexity: limited time, imperfect information, hidden bias, and costly mistakes. But the best hiring systems are often built on a surprisingly small number of clear rules. At Google, I followed a hiring rubric without recognizing the principles behind it. Later, I stumbled upon a business book and had an aha: this was what Google had been doing for years. I took that insight to Uber and Netflix, turned it into something explicit and teachable, and have continued refining with startups. Through real stories, I’ll show how a few shared criteria can produce better interviews, clearer feedback, and faster, more consistent hiring decisions.

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What you'll leave with:

1. Hiring is an exercise in managing risk – and both the upside and downside of each decision compound as a company grows.
2. What Google, Uber, and Netflix reveal about the power of a few shared hiring criteria in complex, fast-growing organizations.
3. Why the real work is not copying Google, Uber, or Netflix, but defining the few rules that predict success in your own company.