Building a team from the ground up in a foreign country

I'm John J. Lentini, The Leadership Engineer. I spent over two decades as a senior leader at some of the world's largest investment banks, and one of the assignments that taught me the most happened far from New York or London. From 2013 to 2015, I was based in Poland leading the build-out of a greenfield operation for a global bank. I needed to hire roughly 100 to 150 staff within six months in a location with no real peer companies to recruit from. There was no competitor across the street to poach from. The traditional resume screen, where you look for direct industry experience, specific credentials, and a familiar career trajectory, was useless to me. The talent pool simply didn't exist in that form.

You cannot hire the resume you wish existed

So I threw out the conventional playbook. Instead of screening for established direct experience, I restructured the entire hiring process around core competencies: problem-solving ability, adaptability, communication skills, and cultural fit. I still read resumes, but what I was reading them for changed completely. I stopped looking for job titles and industry keywords and started looking for evidence of learning agility, Resilience, and transferable skills. A candidate who had never worked in banking but had shown the ability to master complex environments quickly became more attractive than someone with a perfectly formatted resume from a competitor we didn't have. I did hire seasoned people managers and even established financial controllers, but no one with direct experience in investment banking or in sales and trading products and activities.

What changed in the interview room

The screening process shifted accordingly. We moved toward structured interviews built around behavioral and situational questions rather than technical knowledge checks. We simplified application requirements to widen the funnel, because we couldn't afford to filter out capable people over formatting or credential gaps when we had over 100 seats to fill in six months. The process held up all the way through VP-level hires, supported by structured training protocols.

Were there mistakes? Absolutely. When you hire that many people that fast, some remediation is inevitable. But the overall operation was a massive success, and it fundamentally changed how I thought about hiring from that point forward.

Why I never went back

Here's what surprised me: even after I was no longer in a greenfield situation and had the luxury of recruiting from established talent pools, I never returned to the old approach. The experience proved to me that hiring for attitude and training for skill produces stronger, more adaptable teams than paying a 10 to 20 percent premium to bring on an experienced industry peer from a competitor, who may be leaving for reasons that have little to do with what you are building. The people I hired for core competencies in Poland built a culture from scratch, and they could do it precisely because they weren't carrying the baggage of "this is how it's always been done." Within two years, we were comparing more than favorably to our seasoned global peers in hub sites like New York, London, and Singapore.

Volume forced me to rethink resume requirements out of necessity. What I found on the other side of that necessity was a better way to hire.