In this episode, Rosemary sits down with Yasaman, founder of MIA Migration, to talk about what really goes into hiring and building teams that last, especially in fast moving startup environments.
Yasaman shares lessons from hiring and firing over 500 people across hospitality, tech, and immigration, reflecting on how her early experiences shaped the way she hires today. She opens up about red flags, green flags, trusting your gut, and why passion for the mission matters more than resumes, titles, or paychecks.
From redesigning the interview process to navigating hiring in a world influenced by AI, Yasaman offers honest insights on what works, what doesn’t, and why taking more time to hire often leads to better long term outcomes.
This conversation is a grounded and practical look at hiring, leadership, and decision making, with real world lessons for founders, managers, and anyone responsible for building teams.
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When the System Forgets Entrepreneurs: Rethinking Employment in America
I didn’t start a company to be told which chair to buy, how many minutes a lunch break has to be, or whether my break room snacks meet code. I started it because I believed in building something better, and I wanted a team to build it with.
But what I’ve learned over 13 years as a California employer is this: the system doesn’t trust employers to care about their people. It assumes we’re out to exploit, and it assumes compliance creates care. So it piles on rule after rule, not realizing that the weight of all this regulation doesn’t protect good people—instead, I believe it crushes the ones who are trying to be good people.
As a female entrepreneur, I’ve always wanted to give my team the best. Yet I’ve spent more time worrying about lunch break laws than about how to help my people grow. To me, that’s not what leadership is supposed to look like.
Because I believe the best entrepreneurs do care. We remember birthdays. We pull all-nighters. We put payroll before profit. Not because a rulebook told us to, but because that’s who we entrepreneurs are. But somewhere along the way, the system forgot that.
It breaks my heart that the system stifles the very people who build businesses. And I believe that by doing this, we’re not protecting workers—we’re shrinking futures. More and more founders I know are looking abroad, not for cheaper labor, but for the freedom to lead well again.
And that should worry us all. Because when the American dream becomes unlivable for its dreamers, the dream doesn’t die—it just moves to another country.
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Stop Hiring the Person You Like. Start Hiring for What You Need.
If you don’t know what you really need, you’ll hire the person you like most.
I’ve read hundreds of small business job descriptions, and 95% make the same mistake: they’re more of a wishlist than a job description.
A typical one looks like this:
We want someone who can:
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Manage the calendar
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Write the newsletters
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Run operations
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Handle support
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Think like a strategist
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Execute like a machine
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And work across four time zones
What’s the problem with that?
It mixes six completely different skill sets: administrative, creative, operational, technical, strategic, and customer-facing. That’s not a job. It’s a fantasy.
If someone like that existed, they’d already be running their own business, not applying to work for yours.
Here’s what to do instead:
1️⃣ Write down everything you wish this person would do.
2️⃣ Circle the three most critical things.
3️⃣ Build a role around those, not all seventeen.Once you’ve found that person and developed a good rhythm, go back to your list, see what’s still open, and hire the next person.
Hiring isn’t about finding magic. It’s about making trade-offs and slowly building a team that can cover all the tasks you want to delegate.
Focus beats fantasy. Every time.
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The Art (and Science) of Hiring in 2025
Over the past 24 years, I’ve read thousands of resumes, interviewed hundreds of people, and hired across multiple companies. I thought I had a ton of experience — until I met Cecilia and Victoria. I’m in awe.
Why? Because Cecilia and Victoria are true experts at sourcing new team members. The other day, I did a quick calculation: between them, it’s easily over 40,000 interviews throughout their careers. That’s an incredible amount of experience.
And I’m not saying this because they are part of my team, but because I’ve seen firsthand how much hiring has changed over the past 24 months — more than it did in the previous 24 years. Hiring hasn’t gotten easier. Quite the opposite.
I think this is one of the biggest challenges small companies face today: finding the right people in a sea of opportunities. Getting hiring right determines the success of any business. Get it right, and the business grows. Get it wrong, and it stagnates.
Here are three timeless techniques Cecilia and Victoria use when interviewing candidates after scanning thousands of applications:
1. Details that hurt
Anyone can talk about wins. The real test is whether they can tell the story behind them in vivid detail — what really happened, who was involved, and what the friction was. They even ask small things like what the weather was like during a specific event to test authenticity.2. Process over polish
They ask candidates to walk through how they did something, step by step. Real experience is a little messy. Made-up experience sounds like bullet points. They look for the small missteps and corrections that prove genuine experience.3. The pause
Real memory makes people stop and think. Over-rehearsed answers don’t. When on a video interview, do the eyes move slightly as they recall, or do they stay fixed? That’s a subtle but powerful signal.These are fundamentals in a hiring process that has only gotten more complex in recent months. But they remain the foundation — even in a world of a thousand resumes and AI-polished applications.
