This is by no means a comprehensive list. Every role will have its own scorecard and considerations and discrete interview questions – these are just a few adages we’ve found to be broadly applicable and useful in the course of hiring a lot of people through the years.

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“On the fence” defaults to “no hire”

Say it how you want: “if it’s not a ‘hell yes’ it’s a ‘hell no’”, “bias toward reject”, whatever – the point is that a great hiring manager holds a really high bar.

This often means waiting longer to find someone stunning. That’s ok, because it’s always better than the alternative.

Hire for super strengths, not lack of weakness

Every candidate has a mix of strengths and weaknesses of varying amplitudes. As a hiring manager we need to decide how to weigh them.

This is ultimately a reflection of risk tolerance: the conservative hiring manager is going to want to make sure all the boxes are checked, even if none of them are starred. The aggressive hiring manager is willing to overlook some flaws in exchange for asymmetric benefit.

There’s no one right answer – although in a startup that’s placing aggressive bets on high-risk, high-upside outcomes, it often makes sense to have a hiring strategy to match.

One manifestation of this is the literal appearance of the interview scorecard – the candidate with all “yes’s” may seem impressive (lots of green!) but often the lack of a “strong yes” speaks volumes in itself. An incredible candidate will have at least one champion, pounding the table saying “we have to hire this person!”

A corollary to this is that an exceptional candidate can (and often will) have at least one “no” on the scorecard, too. This can be ok, provided the spikes are spikey enough – the aggressive hiring manager will look to take a high-upside bet even if there’s some known weaknesses to manage around.

Making that determination can be tricky – but that’s your job as a Lead (and of course your Lead is here to help!)

Hire weirdos

A useful framing: hire out of distribution. As AI and process get better at producing “in-distribution” work (reliable, repeatable, close to the mean), the leverage increasingly comes from people who can do the opposite.

• Out-of-distribution can mean extreme skill: unusually high craft, taste, or velocity.
• It can also mean unusual thinking: novel perspectives, surprising connections, strong first principles, and ideas that initially seem implausible… but eventually become inevitable.
• Look for evidence of weirdness: side quests, original projects, contrarian bets, and moments where they broke the mold.

In interviews, pressure-test for this by asking for examples of times they challenged the default, invented a new approach, or shipped something that didn’t have a playbook.

Bet on slope, not y-intercept

At a startup the most valuable people aren’t necessarily the ones who walk in knowing everything – it’s the people who can learn and adapt and grow quickly.