The Hire Effect™ Story
THE MicheN
We guide teams to high-performance and train them to hire confidently for themselves. When you no longer need us, we’ve finished our work – gladly.
Add Value Always
No matter how you interact with us, whether you’re browsing our website, downloading a white paper, buying a book or scoping out a project, you will walk away with something that makes your team stronger. A fresh perspective. A sharper understanding. A tool you can actually use.
Genuine Presence
Your business is one of a kind. No two cultures are alike, which means real help requires real, human connection. Our team brings expertise, intense curiosity, and authenticity, never off‑the‑shelf advice. We make it a point to understand your culture deeply so we can connect insight to reality.
Insistent Guidance
We’ll tell you the truth, even when it’s hard for you to hear. Leadership means holding the mirror up kindly but firmly; we promise both. If a problem has roots in your own decisions or habits, we’ll help you see that clearly and work through it with steadiness and respect.
How We Define Culture
At The Hire Effect™, we define business culture as the combination of two things:
- Drivers – What you care about the most, the values and priorities, that guides your every day decisions and actions.
- Mood – How you work together as a team and with everyone involved in your business ecosystem—customers, vendors, contractors, employees, and community members.
Together, these create the living rhythm of a company, how it feels to work there and what it consistently moves toward.
In short: we’re here not just to advise, but to add value, be genuine, and guide you relentlessly toward the best version of your team.
THE Founding
Origins
Although The Hire Effect™ became official on January 1, 2016, its roots stretch much farther back. The tools, methods, and philosophy were built over the decade before we launched, a decade of real-world experience, trial, error, and listening (deep listening) to what business owners were struggling with most.
Before founding The Hire Effect™, Miche spent nearly twenty years running an IT and business alignment consultancy (DCCI) with a partner. DCCI served fortune 1,000 and fortune 500 companies designing the human systems around their IT.
In the early years, she handled operations; in the later ones, she led Sales, HR, Organizational Design and Development, Marketing, and Operations. Somewhere along the way, she realized she was hiring and leading quite differently than most.
In running the consulting practice she began her “fake” job on the weekends and some evenings, the job of listening to and counseling other small business owners about their human systems for hiring and achieving. While others focused only on résumés and roles, she focused on people, purpose and self-accountability for teams that truly fit, both by cultural and skill-set. She saw firsthand how hiring the right human transformed not just performance, but the daily energy and trust within a team.
After DCCI, Miche brought this approach to hundreds of startups and second-stage companies through her work in economic development.
She taught founders and leaders how to hire intentionally, how to see beyond the interview act and into the heart of how someone works, who someone was. Their collective feedback, successes, and stories shaped what became the industry-agnostic tools of The Hire Effect Hiring System™.
In 2017, she distilled the hiring system into her first book, The Hire Effect™ | Hire for Culture and Skill, giving business owners everywhere a way to apply the process themselves. The second edition, published in 2024, expanded on that foundation with The Culture of High-Performing Teams white paper.
Today, The Hire Effect™ has worked with small businesses across nearly every industry. The mission hasn’t changed: to help leaders see people clearly, hire wisely, and build teams that hum like well oiled machines not rusty old buckets.
At its heart The Hire Effect™ isn’t just about hiring better.
It’s about retaining people that fit and achieving the vision set before them.
Shifting from Hiring to High-Performing Teams
By 2019, something interesting started happening: our clients wanted more than help with hiring. They wanted to understand what their real cultures were and how to move toward their aspirational cultures. They also wanted to know what made their teams click, what held them back, and how to lead growth that stayed true to their unique cultures.
As we dug in, patterns began to emerge. The companies with low turnover, high output, and minimal drama, what we call high-performing teams, shared some striking cultural traits in common. Real-world experience with dozens of small businesses revealed exactly which cultural components consistently sustained high performance.
We began documenting those findings and designing practical ways for organizations to measure and strengthen them. One of the most transformative tools to come out of that work was the Self‑Accountability Baseline, a powerful way to get real clarity on who is responsible for what and how to collaborate with one another for success.
That discovery opened the door to the next evolution of our work: consulting for high performance. It’s deeply human work, always fascinating, and often fun, because when culture and self-accountability align, teams don’t just function, they thrive.
Goals Going Forward
Taking care of business owners and helping entrepreneurs evolve their thinking and tighten up their processes will continue to be our primary objective. We are dedicated to always adding to and perfecting our toolsets and that’s exactly what we plan to do going forward. Here are some of our projects currently in the works:
Book #2
Having the Courage to Lead a Self Accountable Team
Book #3
Deliberate and Purposeful Hiring
Podcast
We’ve had a podcast in the works for a while and our intention is to get that officially rolling, so be on the lookout!
More tools for High Performing Teams:
Professional development planning
Onboarding Best Practices
Gratitude
We’re grateful for the many people who think abundantly, dream boldly, and genuinely collaborate with us.
We’re grateful for the challenges and roadblocks we’ve encountered, they’ve made us stronger and sharper.
We’re grateful for the community around us that’s always evolving as humans. We know we’ll never have the right answer, just a more and more powerful perspective that gets us and our clients to where we want to go.