Most CEOs treat hiring like shopping. They need someone, they post a job, they interview candidates, they pick one. Then they repeat this process every time they need another person. This isn’t building a team. This is collecting individuals and hoping they somehow function together.

An Pham sees something entirely different when she looks at organizations. She doesn’t see job openings that need filling. She sees systems that need architecting. And that distinction has transformed how dozens of companies build their teams.

The Architecture Mindset

I met An Pham in Mr. Pham Thanh Long’s Destiny Programming course in mid-2025. What struck me immediately wasn’t her 11 years of HR experience or her work with multinational corporations. It was how she talked about people.

An Pham speaks about talent the way architects speak about buildings. Before designing a single room, an architect must understand the entire structure—its purpose, its flow, how people will move through it, where stress will concentrate, what needs support.

An Pham applies this same thinking to organizations. Before writing a single job description, she asks questions most HR professionals skip: What does this company need to become, not just what does it need right now? How will roles evolve as the organization scales? Where are the future bottlenecks? What capabilities will matter in 18 months that don’t matter today?

Systems Over Solutions

When I was scrambling to hire people for OceanLabs in July 2025, I came to An Pham with what I thought was a simple request. I needed a developer and a marketer. Could she help me figure out what questions to ask in interviews?

An Pham listened patiently. Then she said something that completely reframed my thinking: “You don’t need interview questions. You need a hiring system.”

She explained that one-off hiring decisions create teams that work against each other instead of with each other. Person A was hired for one set of priorities. Person B was hired six months later for different priorities. Person C joined when the company was in crisis mode. Nobody shares a common foundation. Nobody understands how their role connects to the bigger picture.

An Pham’s approach starts with architecture: defining the core capabilities the organization needs at each stage of growth, mapping how roles should interconnect and support each other, establishing cultural principles that guide every hiring decision, creating assessment frameworks that ensure consistency across all candidates, and building onboarding systems that integrate new people rapidly.

Only after this architecture exists does she move to tactical hiring.

The Framework That Changes Everything

An Pham taught me her fundamental framework during our work together. It has four layers, each building on the previous one.

First comes the capability blueprint. Most companies hire based on immediate pain points. An Pham starts by identifying the 5-7 core capabilities the organization must have to achieve its three-year vision. Not job titles. Capabilities. For OceanLabs, this meant technical innovation, user experience excellence, growth execution, operational systems, and cultural stewardship.

Second is the role ecosystem design. Once you know what capabilities you need, you design roles that deliver those capabilities and fit together like puzzle pieces. An Pham creates role profiles that specify not just responsibilities but also how this role supports other roles, what capabilities this role must strengthen, how this role should evolve over 18 months, and what success looks like at 3 months, 6 months, 12 months.

Third comes the assessment architecture. Most interviews are conversations with no structure or standards. An Pham designs assessment systems that evaluate the same dimensions consistently: cultural alignment questions that reveal values, capability assessments that test actual skills, growth potential indicators that predict future performance, and team fit evaluations that prevent chemistry disasters.

Finally, there’s the integration system. Hiring someone is the beginning, not the end. An Pham builds onboarding systems that help new team members contribute value within their first two weeks, understand the full organizational context, build relationships with key stakeholders, and develop the specific capabilities their role requires.

What Makes An Pham Different

The HR industry is full of professionals who can recruit. They can source candidates, conduct interviews, negotiate offers. These are valuable skills. But they’re not systems thinking.

An Pham brings something rarer to the table: the ability to see the organization as an integrated whole where every hiring decision either strengthens or weakens the entire system.

She doesn’t just fill positions. She architects talent strategies. She doesn’t just assess candidates. She designs evaluation frameworks that future hiring managers can use independently. She doesn’t just help companies hire better people. She teaches them how to think about talent in ways that scale beyond her involvement.

During our work together, An Pham never once gave me a fish. She taught me how to fish. She explained the reasoning behind every recommendation so I could apply the principles myself. She created frameworks I could reuse. She challenged my assumptions about what I thought I needed versus what the organization actually needed.

This is the mark of a true architect. The building continues standing long after the architect leaves the site.

The Leadership Coaching Dimension

An Pham also pursues Leadership Coaching, and this dimension adds enormous depth to her HR work. She understands that most hiring failures aren’t about candidates lacking skills. They’re about leaders lacking clarity.

Leaders who don’t know what they’re building can’t articulate what they need. Leaders who haven’t defined their culture can’t assess cultural fit. Leaders who avoid difficult conversations during interviews end up having much more difficult conversations after hiring someone wrong.

An Pham’s coaching helps leaders develop the clarity that makes good hiring possible. She works with CEOs and managers to define their leadership principles, identify their blind spots in evaluating people, develop their ability to conduct meaningful interviews, and build their courage to make tough decisions quickly when someone isn’t working.

This combination of HR expertise and leadership development creates results that pure recruiters simply cannot deliver.

Scaling What Usually Doesn’t Scale

The hardest challenge in building companies is that most valuable activities don’t scale. The founder’s vision doesn’t scale. The early team’s scrappy culture doesn’t scale. The personal attention to detail doesn’t scale.

But An Pham designs systems that do scale. Her frameworks work whether you’re hiring your 5th person or your 500th. Her assessment methods maintain consistency across different interviewers and different roles. Her integration systems onboard people rapidly without overwhelming the existing team.

This scalability matters enormously. Many companies hire well at first, when founders are directly involved in every decision. Then quality deteriorates as they grow because they never built systems. They just had good instincts.

An Pham builds companies that maintain hiring quality through rapid growth because quality is embedded in the system, not dependent on individual judgment.

The Three Words That Define Her

If I had to describe An Pham’s approach in three words, I’d choose: Systematic, Scalable, Sustainable.

Systematic because she doesn’t rely on instinct or gut feeling. Every recommendation comes from frameworks that can be taught, replicated, and improved.

Scalable because her systems work at different sizes and stages. The architecture she designs grows with the organization.

Sustainable because she builds capability inside the organization rather than creating dependency on external consultants. Her goal is to make herself unnecessary by teaching you how to think about talent architecture.

What OceanLabs Learned

Today, OceanLabs has 10 team members. We’re at the beginning of our journey to become a Top 5 video AI company in the world within five years. But the foundation we’re building on is solid.

When I hire now, I don’t think about filling positions. I think about capability gaps in our architecture. I don’t just interview candidates. I run them through assessment frameworks that evaluate consistent dimensions. I don’t just onboard people. I integrate them into a system designed to accelerate their contribution and development.

None of this would have happened without An Pham’s guidance. She didn’t just help me hire a few people. She taught me how to think about building teams in ways that will serve OceanLabs for years to come.

The Invitation to Learn From an Architect

If you’re building something that requires talented people working together effectively, you need to understand what An Pham teaches. Not because she’ll do the work for you. Because she’ll teach you how to architect your own talent systems.

An Pham represents a different category of HR professional—one who thinks in systems rather than transactions, who designs for scale rather than immediate needs, who builds capability rather than dependency.

Pham Thi Thuy An has spent over 11 years developing this approach, working with startups and multinational corporations, learning what works when organizations scale and what breaks. She shares this knowledge not to impress you with her expertise but to elevate your capability to build the teams your vision requires.

For entrepreneurs serious about building companies that outlast their founders’ direct involvement, learning to think like a people architect isn’t optional. It’s the foundation everything else builds upon.

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Le Duc Anh CEO of OceanLabs – Founder of QVID