How Scaling Companies Should Hire for the Next Stage, Not Today’s Vacancy

First and foremost, a strong resume shows what someone has done.

It does not prove that they are right for what your business needs next.

Very, very important, guys.

Often many companies are, you know, hiring for skill sets and resumes and they are enticed by big names, big profiles, big educations, and all that is great.

And in fact, a lot of times, you know, even experienced recruiters will make this mistake.

They get very frustrated that their clients are not willing to interview someone that's got an incredible background at an incredible company, went to a good school.

And often I had to you know, train them and kind of say, hey, slow down for a minute.

Yes, this guy out of Meta from Carnegie Mellon is a phenomenal candidate.

But this person's only worked at big enterprise customers or companies, and now they're going to a startup environment where they're going to have to go 100 times faster.

So he's not a fit for those reasons.

He is a great candidate, just not for that great company.

Many companies hire capable people whose skills, style, or experience do not match their current situation.

This is very, very common, right? Often, I will notice that if we're working with a company and they hire someone else and we'll say, oh, who did you end up hiring? And when we see who they're hiring, often I'm a little bit surprised.

And the reason why is because it's what I just described, right? They fell for a shiny resume.

They got really excited by a big profile.

Or maybe they were given a name, a reference, a referral.

And all that is wonderful.

But did they really interview this person for the environment that they have and don't have today? or at least where they're headed next.

So one key question I always ask, can this person succeed here right now with our existing team, with our existing culture, resources, and challenges, right? Not for the dream company we think we're building or we are building, and not for when these resources are magically going to disappear because we're about to raise our funding in a year.

Not for all of our optimistic perspectives, but what we have today.

It's very, very important, right? You can build in the optimism.

You can tell them about all the things that potentially they will have in the near future.

But we have to stay true to what we have today if we really want to do a good job hiring.

So one of the things I recommend doing is starting with the business needs.

Some companies need builders.