The most important rule of recruiting

One of the best lessons I've learned about recruiting is to be okay with passing on people who seem like they could be amazing but where I don't have really high conviction yet that they are.

It's a form of abundance mindset.

Someone else will always come along where both of those things end up being true.

Be ok with waiting for the best candidate, instead of someone who is merely good

Startups live and die by their speed. When recruiting there is always the urge to recruit as quickly as possible to maintain velocity, keep your team unblocked, and to get back to the actual work more quickly.

The problem is when recruiting, 70% of candidates will be obvious no’s, 29.5% will be potentially amazing, potentially just good, and 0.5% will be obvious rockstars.

It’s tempting to move forward with a category two candidate, someone who seems like they could be incredible with medium sized error bars.

Perhaps you continue interviewing them and you get a bit more sure that they are great, perhaps you like them as a person and really want them to work out or just don’t want to say no to them, perhaps you don’t enjoy the discomfort of hiring under uncertainty and just want to resolve as quickly as possible. Perhaps you’ve been recruiting for this position for six months and you needed them to start yesterday and your team is clearly getting antsy.

Any of these things can let you convince yourself that it’s ok to hire this person and they’ll probably work out, right?

This is a mistake. Not because the candidate definitely won’t be good, because people can definitely surprise you in a pleasant way.

It’s a mistake because you made a low conviction decision.

If you don’t have conviction on the candidate it means you don’t have enough information about the candidate.

It doesn’t mean this candidate is bad. But it does mean you can’t move forward without risk.

And sometimes, for some candidates, you will just never be able to get the signal you need for them in a timeframe that’s reasonable.

So instead, you need to be ok with passing on lots of potentially amazing candidates that you have low conviction on, so you can more quickly get to that one amazing candidate that you’re sure is amazing.

This doesn’t mitigate risk completely but if you have a good hiring framework and your intuition is well calibrated (which only happens by combining lots of experience/data with the best framework/s you can find until you find one that spits out answers that are as accurate as possible) it will be the quickest way to build that team of A players that you know you need.