Wintercircus — Maura Nachtergaele: building the A-team
Maarten Laruelle Maura Nachtergaele, co-founder of Payflip, talked Wednesday 3/6/26 at Winter Circus Collective in Ghent about how to build your A-team. It was a masterclass in how to build the process to guarantee you hire bar raisers, and an advice on why not to work with recruiters.
Some of my takeaways.
Bar raisers, not warm bodies
Maura borrows the term “bar raisers” from Amazon’s culture book Working Backwards, where the idea is that every hire should raise the average, not lower it. For me she made a sharp distinction by comparing Payflip with a sports team and explicitly not a family. No emotional confusion between professional and private. You’re here because you perform in your position and together we are a team that plays together and wins together.
Always be hiring, but not how you think
Most people hear “always be hiring” and think it means constantly running job ads, posting on LinkedIn… Maura sees it a bit differently.
She expressed that you continuously should be building a network specifically for this. How? Someone impressive visits your LinkedIn profile? Send them a personalized message. Meet someone interesting at an event? Make work of a follow-up coffee. Not because you are looking now, but because you are building that pool of A-players for when you need them. She does the same when she does reference calls: just ask that reference if he or she knows anybody else that would be good to talk to. The trap most fall into is to hire from urgency, when you need someone now, because then you make suboptimal choices. Building that talent pool partially protects you from that.
She was very blunt on one thing: do not use recruiters for your first 20 hires. You have to do it yourself for the simple reason that the people who join early define everything that comes after.
The 15-minute phone call
Before sending candidates into a long process, Maura calls them for 15 minutes. She doesn’t let them do much of the talking. She sells by being ridiculously enthusiastic. Her point: people eat enthusiasm over the phone. If you believe in what you’re building, let that come through before you start evaluating them. No one ever said no to that first call, and only then the formal process starts.
Three phases, aka no winging it
Payflip runs three interview phases: screening, technical, behavioral. The screening is gut feeling. You get to know each other, ask generic questions about their context, motivation, strengths, weaknesses. This part is not that scientific, it rather is a calibration. The technical interview is role-specific. This is where you find out if they can actually do the job. Every function has its own version. The behavioral interview is the same for everyone. During the session Maura showed screenshots of their Notion setup. We could see that it is a fully scripted phase. Why was that last part so heavily scripted? Because if you wing this part, you confirm what you already believe. The script forces consistency and that consistency allows you to compare candidates fairly.
Scoring during the process and closing
Payflip uses a 1-4 scoring system. After each phase, four people from the team score the candidate. If nobody gives a 4 out of 4, the candidate is out. Others can have scored the candidate with a 2 or 3, but there has to be at least one 4 in there. The bar is high and that is on purpose, because every early hire shapes the company. Maybe at a later stage they could loosen it a bit, but for now it is super strict and founder-owned. When someone is a fit, they move very fast. They do everything to close the whole process in 3, max 4 weeks. No one has time for a six-week-plus hiring marathon and certainly not a good candidate. Even when someone isn’t a fit, they always still get a call. Because even rejected candidates are potential leads, ambassadors, or sources of referrals. The way you treat people on the way out says as much about your culture as how you treat them on the way in.
No negotiation
Where you clearly see that Payflip is a payroll company is in their transparent salaries. Those that have worked in corporates recognize the table: levels on one axis, years of experience on the other, and the intersection gives you the number.
At the offer stage they do not negotiate. They did the work to build a fair system that is equal for everybody. They assessed the candidate and the number is the number. No commission or bonus plans; on the other hand an ESOP program that allows you to profit from long-term results rather than short-term achievements. In the end some people refuse, but Maura won’t throw the system away for one candidate. The integrity of the policy matters more than any single hire.
Culture is your best strategy
Most founders treat culture as a nice-to-have, something you figure out once you’ve scaled. Maura treats it as the product, the thing you’re building alongside the solution you are selling. During the hiring you build the culture — not in values on a wall, but in who you let in and who you don’t. The enthusiasm on the first call. The rigor in the process. The honesty in rejection. She made me think about how many founders outsource hiring because it feels like overhead. And how much they give up when they do.
Maura Nachtergaele is co-founder of Payflip. This session was part of Winter Circus Collective in Ghent.
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