Found at a butchery, and found at twenty-three
NEWSLETTER 004
5 October 2026
Stacked launches online tomorrow and in Cape Town on Thursday.
Details at the bottom.
A butchery in Paarl
Kurt-Lee Arendse was packing pork sausages at a butchery in Paarl when Chester Williams found him. Williams had been the only player of colour in the 1995 World Cup-winning squad, and he'd scored four tries in the quarter-final against Samoa. He bought Arendse his first pair of rugby boots and took him to the University of the Western Cape, where he was coaching. Williams died in September 2019, aged forty-nine, before he could see what came next. In 2023 Arendse played in the World Cup final, which the Springboks won by a single point, and saved a certain try with a tackle that wrapped ball and man and drove Rieko Ioane into touch.
Makazole Mapimpi grew up in Tsholomnqa, a rural village in the Eastern Cape, and walked ten kilometres each way to school. He was twenty-three before the national set-up noticed him at the Border rugby union in East London. Before the 2019 World Cup, the management asked the players to bring photographs of their family members, to be placed behind the squad numbers on the back of their jerseys for the farewell Test against Argentina. Mapimpi handed in photographs of himself, because there was no one else. He went on to score the first try by a Springbok in any World Cup final.
What to take from the story
South African rugby has a well-worn hiring pipeline. At home it runs from Craven Week through SA Schools to the Junior Boks, mostly through the strong unions with the big schools behind them. Abroad it tracks the South Africans playing in Europe, the UK and Japan. Neither of these men came through that hiring pipeline.
This is the engine of the Springboks' success: a team drawn from every walk of South African life. The hiring pipeline tells you who did well inside the system. Looking sideways helps find the talent the system missed. And a team that only hires from its pipeline ends up looking like its pipeline.
The weather this week
Ask where your team's last five hires came from. Most teams hire from the same few places: the same universities, the same competitors, referrals from the same networks.
Monday Morning
One question for your team this week. If your hiring pipeline is mostly vertical, what would it take to start seeing sideways, and who's standing just outside the view?
For more on hiring practices inspired by the back-to-back Rugby World Cup champions, check out my new book Stacked at paulsteenkamp.com/books
ONE SMALL
BRAVE THING
Pick one place you never recruit from, or one group you rarely promote from. This week, have one conversation with someone there and ask them what they're working on.
Paul Steenkamp Writer. Speaker. Builder.
If you've been wondering how to find the people your pipeline keeps missing, bring that question to a Stacked launch. There are four, and two of them are this week.
Tuesday 6 October → online → 5PM
Thursday 8 October → Exclusive Books → V&A Waterfront → 6PM
Tuesday 20 October → Exclusive Books, Somerset Mall → 6PM
Thursday 29 October → Exclusive Books, Rosebank Mall → 6.30PM to 8.30PM
To book your place at any of them, go to paulsteenkamp.com/contact, click the book launch registration button, and tell us which one you're coming to.
I'd love to hear your answer to this week's Monday Morning question in person.
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