Hire For The Scorecard, Not The CV

Ask a founder why a hire did not work out and you will usually hear a character explanation. They were not hungry enough. They were not a culture fit. They looked better on paper.

Ask what the role was supposed to deliver in its first six months and the answer is almost always vague. That vagueness is the actual cause, and it was present before the first interview.

A job description is not a definition

A job description lists responsibilities: manage the pipeline, own customer success, support the finance function. None of those can be passed or failed. They describe territory, not outcomes.

A scorecard describes outcomes. Three to five of them, each one a result with a number and a date attached. Not manage the pipeline but by month four, every deal over a certain size has a next step and a date, with no deal untouched for more than a fortnight.

What a scorecard forces

• Agreement before the search. Two founders often want quietly different things from the same hire. Writing it down surfaces that in an hour rather than six months.
• Better questions. Every interview question becomes a probe of a specific outcome, not a general conversation about experience.
• Comparable candidates. When all four candidates are scored against the same written outcomes, the decision is a comparison rather than a memory of who was most charming on the day.
• A fair probation. The person knows what they are being measured on from day one, which is both more effective and more decent.

Interview the same way every time

Unstructured interviews mostly measure how comfortable you feel with someone, which correlates with similarity to you and almost nothing else. Structured interviews — the same questions, in the same order, scored immediately — are dull and considerably more accurate.

Score each answer before you discuss it with anybody. Group discussion before scoring produces agreement, not accuracy; the first person to speak sets the room.

The last question

Before the offer goes out, ask yourself one thing: would I be glad to have this person if they performed exactly to the scorecard and no more? If the answer needs a story about potential, the answer is no.

Hiring is one of the few decisions where slowing down costs almost nothing and speeding up costs a year.