Hook
“She was there when they grew from 20 to 400 people. She'll bring the recipe,” the CEO told me.I asked one question back.“What did she do when it went wrong?”Silence. Nobody had asked.We hire people from success stories because we hope the success is portable. Sometimes it is. Often it isn't.Seeing success up close is not the same as knowing how to repeat it. In a growing company, the tailwind does a lot of the work. You only see what someone can really do when the wind turns.So in the next interview we changed the questions:→ Tell me about a plan of yours that failed. What did you do in the first week?
→ What did you stop doing when the money got tight?
→ Who did you have to let go, and how did you tell them?
→ What would you do differently today?The candidate with the famous logo on the CV had good answers to none of them.Another candidate, from a company nobody had heard of, had been through a funding round that fell apart. She answered all four in detail.The CEO hired her.A success story tells you where someone has been. A failure tells you what they can do.What do you ask a candidate to find out how they handle a bad year?
