Amit Rathmore has a thought-provoking essay, Recruiting and the Butterfly Effect. His conclusion is that the people closest to the founding team need to be the ones interviewing candidates, so that the newest hires are as close the ideals and capabilities as the original hires. My only quibble with Amit is that this technique does not scale.
In my opinion, Amit doesn't take his thesis far enough. All too often, those founders use shorthand of some sort to describe candidates. It's worth the time it takes to describe just what you want in an employee, so you don't have to depend on only the original employees being the only ones who could interview candidates. (How will other people learn to interview? What happens when people move out of their original roles into other roles?) A little job analysis goes a long way. Especially if you want to avoid the butterfly effect.
Arghhhh. Having been in incredibly inbred startups, one runs the risk of groupthink and a bunch of clones trying to take on roles they don’t have skills for.
On the other hand, it worked for Google 🙂