Best Predictor For Hiring Success in Startups

The biggest predictor of a successful hire at an early-stage startup is whether the person has already worked at a comparable early-stage startup. Having gone through similar challenges (technical or not) and having built the character to push through them lines up far better with what a startup actually needs than any scorecard of technical skills and culture traits.

In the early days, I put most of my weight on technical excellence. But I started my company as a mechanical/biomedical engineering graduate, and over a decade of running it I ended up hiring hardware and software engineers, designers, operations people, clinicians, board members, and supporting marketing and sales recruitment on top of it. Very soon I was assessing people to do work that had little to do with my own craft. I was a generalist whose job was to technically evaluate specialists across a dozen different fields I didn’t yet belong to. So I was listing out skills, learning just enough about each one to be able to assign a score to a candidate. Then I’d sit through long interview discussions on technical details I only half understood. It was slow and paralyzing. I’d walk out of interviews more insecure than when I walked in, because I could never fully trust my own read on someone’s depth.

At some point, we also started having scorecards for culture, too. A list of values, scored candidate by candidate. What actually happened was that my cofounder and I ended up debating which values mattered most and whether our interviews were even the right tool to assess that.

Scorecards are still a great tool, and I still use them, but they only work if you already have crystal clarity on two things underneath them. Can this person do the role. And can this person thrive with us. Both are harder to pin down than they sound, and getting to that clarity is the hard part, especially when many people are involved in the hiring process.

I then started carefully observing successful and experienced CEOs and CTOs running interviews, and specifically how much of their questioning went toward how a candidate actually thinks, their work ethic, whether people would want to work alongside them, rather than a checklist of hard or soft skills. I also watched other founders wrestle with the exact same struggle I had and land in the same place, whether they called it “knows what a startup is” or “has the right energy.”

That matched what I saw in my own hiring. Every great hire I made shared one thing: they were either coming out of a startup, wanted to eventually found their own, or were simply fed up with corporate bureaucracy and the lack of meaning in it. And the hires that became truly excellent were the ones where that work-ethic alignment came together with real clarity, on my side, about what I actually needed them to do. I couldn’t always see this while it was happening. I only understood the pattern by connecting the dots backwards, years later. Those people became what I’d call hires for life — not just successful working relationships, but people I’m still friends with today.

Having that track record at a comparable, successful startup is an insightful proxy. It is a promise of culture fit and sound judgement, and that promise is what amplifies whatever technical potential is already there. Technical excellence without it is a dead end. In the dark moments — and startups produce plenty of them — you need good tooling, which is competence. But without light, which is personality, you just keep digging in the wrong direction.