Hana Wimberly

Hana Wimberly works on the human side of hiring, the part no applicant-tracking system has managed to automate. She co-founded Snatch UP, a recruiting service built on strategic headhunting, and specializes in Seed, Series A, and Series B hiring. Her approach is extremely targeted, built around quality, finding the person who genuinely fits and sticks around to make the team better. She places candidates across every function, from technical roles to go-to-market. Hana has truly worked both sides of the table. She's served as VP of HR at a startup, where she built the talent strategy behind their first 30 hires, and she also mentors and coaches candidates directly, lecturing and running seminars on how to run a smarter job search. At The Art of People she writes about hiring the same way she practices it. Honest, direct, and unafraid of the messy human bits. She splits her time between the U.S. and Lisbon.

Articles by Hana Wimberly

• Job Hugging: Four Claims About Cautious Workers, Tested Against the Data — UK vacancies sat about a tenth below their pre-pandemic level in mid-2026, so staying put is a rational move rather than a loyal one. We test four claims about job hugging and what each means for hiring.
• Why the Best Recruiters Are Made, Not Born — Gut instinct fills seats. Structured recruiting builds teams that stay. Here's an honest teardown of how gut-feel hiring habits form, what they cost, and the ten-minute fixes that turn recruiting into a craft you can teach and defend.
• Unfair Dismissal at Six Months: What the Employment Rights Act Changes for Hiring in 2027 — From 1 January 2027 the UK qualifying period for unfair dismissal falls to six months. That makes the month-three conversation the most important date in your hiring calendar.
• Fake Job Candidates: A Calm Guide to Verifying Who You Are Interviewing — Gartner projects that up to one in four candidate profiles may be fabricated by 2028, and 6% of job seekers surveyed admitted to interview fraud. One live check, applied to everybody, covers most of the risk.
• How to Reject a Candidate After an Interview: One Email, Taken Apart — A composite rejection email scores four out of ten against five tests. Here is where the other six points went, with the rewrite that earns them back.
• Ask a Headhunter: Should I Ever Hire My Friend? — Hiring a friend can work - but this scenario scores just 3 out of 10. Here is how to run the scorecard before it costs you both the role and the relationship.
• How Do You Identify the Founding Hire? — The founding hire isn't just your first key person — it's the decision that sets the chain for everything that follows. Get the role definition wrong, and the sourcing, vetting, and first ninety days all reflect that. Here's how to get the sequence right.
• How to Decide Between Multiple Job Offers — Five things candidates are told when choosing between job offers — and how many of them actually hold up. With a decision tree, sharper citations, and one honest uncertainty about what really determines whether you thrive.
• The Employee Referral Premium: Why Referred Hires Stay, and How to Keep It — A study of nine large employers found referred workers were substantially less likely to quit, with the advantage coming from lower turnover and cheaper recruiting. The mechanism is information, and it is easy to break.
• Candidate Communication: How First-Time Hirers Stop Losing People to Silence — Poor communication, not pay, was the top reason candidates abandoned applications in one 2024 survey. The remedy is a date and the discipline to honour it.
• Frontend, Backend, Full Stack: What Recruiters Need to Know —
• What a Great Cyber Startup Hiring Manager Does Differently in the First Call — What great cyber startup hiring managers do differently in the first call - and why those thirty minutes determine more than most teams realise.
• How to Read Hiring Market Signals Before They Hit the Headlines — Reading the hiring market early - through recruiter language shifts, job posting patterns, and hiring manager behaviour - gives talent leaders and founders the lead time to make better headcount decisions before the headlines confirm the shift.
• How to Build a Repeatable Hiring Process That Actually Scales — Building a repeatable hiring process means every new role benefits from what you learned the last time - here's how to create one that actually scales.
• Why CEOs Call Me After a Bad Hire, Never Before — The real cost of a bad hire goes far beyond salary and severance - here's what it actually takes from your team, your clients, and your time.
• 7 Personality Traits That Separate Good Recruiters from Great Ones — The personality traits that make a great recruiter are not about charisma or hustle - they are a specific, interconnected set of qualities that shape every hiring conversation.
• Tech Job Titles Are Broken — Here's How Recruiters Can Adapt — Tech job titles are unreliable by design - here's how recruiters can decode what roles actually require and hire the right people anyway.
• Why a Thank You to Your Recruiter Actually Matters — A genuine thank you to your recruiter after getting the job matters more than you think - and it matters from both sides of the hire.