About us
We ran the business on data, and hired on instinct.
“Hire two at a time. Generally one will work out.”
That was the advice I got a few years into running teams at a systematic trading hedge fund. It wasn’t cynical, it was the industry standard. And it stuck with me, because our whole job at the fund was the opposite: building systems that made millions of decisions on data, with nothing left to instinct if it could be measured. Then I’d walk into a hiring decision and run the most important call in the business on gut feel.
The real problem took longer to see. A CV is a thin signal. It tells you what someone has done, not how they think, what they care about, or where they’ll thrive, and it’s only getting thinner as more CVs are written by AI and converge on the same shape.
So I pulled hiring apart the way we’d pull apart any trading question, and ran the experiment for seven years inside the fund, across every kind of role. Hit-and-miss gave way to something that compounded. The tenth hire was better than the first. The thirtieth was better than the tenth.
By the time I left, the conviction was clear. The way most businesses hire isn’t a recruitment problem. It’s a structural one. The industry solves for filling a seat, which is not the same as building a team that compounds. That’s the gap Ploomo was built to close.
Josh del Rio, Founder
