The Founders Guide to Spotting Outlier Talent
What signals do elite founders look for when hiring? This edition of The Braintrust digs in.
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In our case study on Hummingbird Ventures, we shared the story of Peak Games, a Turkish gaming startup acquired by Zynga in 2020 for $1.8 billion. The Peak story is full of compelling aspects, including its brushes with failure, impressive growth, and lasting impact on the domestic startup scene.
However, it’s the hiring practices of its founder, Sidar Sahin, that I find myself returning to most often: he held job interviews at midnight. Why? Because he believed it was an efficient way of finding people motivated by the opportunity and challenges of building a high-growth startup. If a candidate wasn’t willing to jump on a call at 12 PM, they probably weren’t suited to Peak’s fast-paced environment.
Though an extreme example, Peak’s strategy illustrates the creativity founders must employ to find and recruit suitable talent. It’s usually not enough to simply hire a head-hunter and filter through resumés. Median techniques lead to median outcomes, which goes against the very point of high-growth startups. So, how do great founders identify strong candidates? What processes do they run to build conviction? What red flags do they keep an eye out for? And how do they construct outlier teams?
In today’s piece, eight exceptional founders share their strategies.
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Quick hits
If you only have a few minutes to spare, here are eight highlights from The Braintrust’s contributors on how to hire exceptional talent.
Avlok Kohli looks at a candidate’s writing for indications of their proficiency.
David Hsu relies on backchanneling with former employers and optimizes for cultural fit.
Christina Cacioppo uses a “principles interview” to find aligned colleagues.
Jack Altman warns against hiring the “safe” choice.
Mathilde Collin leverages Front’s geographical advantages.
Trae Stephens hires for intelligence and adaptability over role-based skills.
Immad Akhund finds great value in having a recruiting team in-house.
Pedro Franceschi favors leaders that can “operate at all levels.”
Read on to discover the full list of tactics and strategies.
“Talent isn’t about IQ, it’s about giving a shit”
Avlok Kohli, CEO at AngelList
My non-consensus opinion is that you can make a call on a candidate very quickly based on the quality of their written responses to interview questions. This task and other hiring projects tend to be full of breadcrumbs. There are a lot of leading indicators in how clearly someone presents their thinking, how structured they are, and how much care has gone into their output. Talent isn’t about IQ, it’s about giving a shit. At AngelList, we’re looking for people that put energy and care into their work, people that give a shit.
While each role goes through a slightly different process, I almost always conduct the final interview. Over time, that’s given me the chance to get in a lot of reps, honing my ability to identify predictive traits. Before a candidate meets with me, I send them a list of questions to respond to in writing. It allows me to see how structured their thinking is and how they perform on asynchronous tasks without time pressure. I ask questions like:
How do you practice becoming better at what you do?
What’s an unpopular opinion you hold?
What’s something that wouldn’t exist in the world without you?
This process is an efficient way of quickly distinguishing between good and bad fits. That allows us to focus on finding the edge between good and great. You can almost always tell from someone’s answers if they have at least a glimmer of something really interesting.
Someone’s rate of learning is another strong predictor. Currently, AngelList’s hiring process doesn’t allow us to see how someone improves over even a short period. It’s more of a point-in-time assessment. I think the way Linear manages its process, particularly its use of two to five-day trials, is interesting. It gives them a way to see how someone receives and responds to feedback, among other things.
While this isn’t something we do now, I always look for a sharp slope from employees. When you see someone who’s learning really fast, that can be a good prompt to say, ‘Hey, let’s promote this person.’ Its absence is maybe a sign they’re not a good fit. Again, I think it’s a key signal that you can use to decisively extrapolate likely impact.
“Just because they worked well for a different company doesn't necessarily mean they'll do well at yours!”
David Hsu, Founder and CEO at Retool
Most recruiting comes down to identifying culture fit. References and experience generally make it pretty clear whether somebody is capable of doing the job. (I generally trust references more than interviews because it is hard, in a few hours, to glean more signal than somebody who has worked with the candidate for years.) So, in terms of assessing their capabilities (with regard to the role), I generally rely on backchannel references.
But just because they worked well for a different company doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll do well at yours! Your company has a different culture, and different types of people will do well in it. You should get explicit on what kind of culture you have, what types of people will do well in it, and ways for testing for that during the interview process. For example, at Retool, people who do well in our culture typically have high ownership, low ego, are highly practical (and outcome-oriented), and enjoy collaborating with others. We test for all of those during the interview process.
Given our culture, there are certain types of people who won’t necessarily do well. For example, somebody who is more opinionated about the way something gets done (as opposed to the outputs) is something we try to filter out in our interview. We might ask about decisions they made where they were right or wrong and try to understand how the person measures the “rightness” of the decision, for example.
I’m not sure there are any universal questions (outside of genuine curiosity) that will help you find people who fit your culture. It’s something every leader and every company has to define for themselves.
“It’s an open-ended format grounded in scenarios and is unlike our other interviews”
Christina Cacioppo, CEO and Co-founder at Vanta
At Vanta, we talk a lot about our principles. They’re the core tenets that guide how we work, how we hire, and how we interact with customers and partners.
Since Vanta’s earliest hires in 2018, we’ve always done an interview around our principles. While our principles and the interview itself have changed, the desire to match how we work with how candidates work has remained.
Our principles interview should tap into how a candidate thinks, makes decisions, and communicates. It’s an open-ended format grounded in scenarios and is unlike our other interviews.
It’s not a “culture-fit” interview; we don’t want to hire or decline candidates based on something unrelated to the role. For us, building an enduring company necessitates articulating how we work and how we make decisions via principles.
Generally, engineers found it a strange but sensible interview. A lot of the questions prompted them to talk through their thoughts out loud, which is pretty common in software engineering. Sales people, on the other hand, were much more confused by the interview. Many of them left the interview and told the hiring manager or recruiter they couldn’t tell how they did.
Our open-ended questions didn’t have right or wrong answers in an absolute sense, but a couple of years in, we realized that there are right and wrong answers for Vanta. One example is a question that asks the conditions a candidate prefers to work in. When we hired candidates whose answers rounded to “an environment with clear goals and objectives,” we later found they struggled in the fast-paced and sometimes chaotic environment of a hyper-growth startup.
We learned this because we sometimes hired in spite of our principles interview, and in those instances, we learned to use our principles as the lens to determine whether they were a good fit for Vanta and whether we were a good fit for them.