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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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.
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!)
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.
Again here – this is a reflection of betting on upside vs. minimizing downside. The conservative hiring manager will only want to hire a “sure thing” who has been there, done that, and has the track record to prove it. The more aggressive hiring manager is looking for learning sponges who may start behind, but will scale quickly because their slope is so high.
How do you assess for slope? Ask lots of questions about mistakes they’ve made, what they learned, and how they’ve changed. Try to understand their progression – in previous jobs, were they consistently given more? Moved into new roles? Were they someone folks put bets on? Or were they on a steady plateau?
We’re a highly memetic species, and our conceptions of what good looks like are always modeled after behaviors we’ve observed. It’s just very hard to do a job better than you’ve seen it done, either first-hand or through disciplined studying.
Any top candidate should have something they can point to as their platonic ideal of excellence – whether it’s a peer, a manager, or a culture that they can emulate and aspire to.