Hire for Potential : Interview questions you should ask

One of the hiring strategies that I have seen employed to good result, is the ‘hire for potential’ strategy. We often come across talented candidates who may not sit in our exact domain expertise, who do not have the exact type of industry knowledge, but whom we feel can do a good job, can contribute to more than the status quo in your startup’s current stage of growth, and possibly be there for your next stage of growth, as well. 

In certain markets, there are known shortages of talent pools, and therefore the ‘hire for potential’ strategy is employed by default. In other words, we have to eventually hire talent who, on paper, seem underqualified criterion-wise, but likely could do the job and a good one, at that. Sometimes, we come across hiring managers or founders who are a little too obsessed with their ‘wishlist’. If you or your team lacks flexibility and is too rigid on both the criteria (on the ‘must haves’ working experience), and the traits (being able to collaborate, present well with slides, etc), you will then need to be prepared to sacrifice time and inevitably the process is made longer to find the right candidate who may or may not, exist.

Conversely, if you are aiming to hire the ‘top 1% of engineers’, if you are willing to spend time and put together an all-star seed team for a complex technology product, by all means, go for it! This is just another way of building talented startup teams. I have put together a list of questions that could help to find out if the talent you find could potentially be the right person to join your startup team.

Basic Questions

Please keep in mind the following 2 questions as you go through this list :

Who do I want to work with?

Who will want to work for me?

Use the above questions to shape the type of team you want to build. Not many people have the pleasure of building teams from scratch and it is truly what you decide to do first that really matters. Startup teams that succeed are often operationally strong with good ethics.

We devised a set of questions, here:

Based on your understanding of the role, and your knowledge of our startup’s present growth stage, what are the challenges and opportunities that you see in this role that you are applying for/have been hunted into?

This is a simple check-in to see if the candidate actually understands the demands of the role.

Describe a situation where you had to improvise / rely on unproven ideas to achieve results ?

In a startup culture where operating in various situations with little relevant knowledge is often done on a frequent basis , this question helps to assess if the candidate has initiative and the ability to think on their feet. 

Do you believe in our business and its vision ?

We think it is extremely important to ask this question. We want to know about the doubts the candidate has and see if they can provide solutions to overcome these doubts.

Describe your ideal work culture ?

We get a gauge on the candidate’s comfort level working in a startup environment. If they describe a very structured and formal process then it could mean that they are not suitable - we can choose to be transparent about the realities of working here - and perhaps drop the candidate at this stage.

What type of co-worker would you never want to work with and explain why you will never want to work with him/her ?

This question is related to the earlier question and can provide insight into culture fit as well as how collaborative or cooperative an environment the candidate is used to having.

Describe a success you had, in your previous role ?

Look at the examples they provide, if it shows initiative, bravery, humility in identifying lessons and mistakes. A bonus would be if they can describe how they championed certain projects to completion, at scale.

What sort of situation will cause you to leave the company ?

The answer gives you an idea about shaping retention strategy for these sorts of candidates, as well as the candidate’s personal inclination to stay or leave.

For graduate hires or those with less working experience we typically ask:

Why are you looking for a new job ?

Apart from the obvious reason that they are looking for a first job after graduation, candidates should share about what they want to achieve, compelling reasons, pull factors. This is a good question to check on the candidate’s motivation.

What are 2 - 3 things you look for in a new job?

Good candidates will attempt to discuss the challenges they look for, probably a strong leadership who will help them to ‘go forward’, identify a way to progress in their career path, these are the candidates that we will select for the next interview stage.

Your ideal / dream job : what type of work, dream company, or dream position?

This will tell you more about the inner motivation and the interest levels of the candidate. 

Advanced Questions

Too often I have seen many startups trying innovative methods of interviewing, adding panel interviews, online quizzes, psychology assessments, etc. I am definitely not a fan of ‘over-engineering’ the process. Getting the right talent is not a matter that can be solved by a scientific approach. Often the only purpose of these additional processes only serves to create confusion and doubt. I think it would be more worthwhile to spend time on adding assessment type tools in a learning and development category, to help train the people you have hired, and I am opposed to using too many tools to assess for the perfect fit. 

The initial conversations should be kept short, around 20 - 30 minutes on the phone as a start. Of course, if the person has great potential there could be an option to immediately extend the chat. As a diversity -focused leader, please think about your biases and if you are selecting the candidate for interview because they are similar to you in profile, or background. If you choose very different candidates instead, this could contribute to a more competitive team, due to the differences in approach and execution. More ideas on how to accomplish the same goals together. It is not always possible in niche technical fields to do so, but whenever possible, I try to not interview only one gender for a role. The same goes for nationality, etc. It is a bit of a stretch especially for technical roles in technology startups, but a good male:female ratio in interviewing candidates, is also something to aspire to.

Once you have mastered the basic questions, you can have an in-depth discussion with your co-founders or hiring manager on the specific questions to find the ‘first Head of Sales, the first VP Finance’, etc. 

Here’s a real life example:

Founder who is hiring a Senior BD person, the first BD person for the early stage team. In this case, the role reports directly into the Founder:

Initially I would like someone coming into this role to focus on delivering clarity on product-market fit for our market including geographies, margins, direct sales and channels strategy. The hire needs to start attending partner meetings with me and build relationships with existing and new customers, focusing the relationship on the verticals which I am not directly working on a daily basis but need to keep warm and convert to leads; assuming we do not hire any further sales specialists. The relationships are focused on specialised partners such as those with system integrators, investor network, and contract business development Advisors. The hire will need to own and immediately develop a partnership programme allowing standardised terms of engagement with commercial partners, globally. This decides our margins, incentives for solution selling. 

Eventually, this hire is expected to develop an aggressive roadmap on revenue growth and action plans on ‘how to hit it’, develop the BD organization within, including hiring strategy and key people we need as business advisors, completely own business verticals and their sales approach, build strong and deep brand value within the market, working closely with PR and Content Marketing teams. 

Once you have received the briefing, come up with a list of questions that could check on the criteria mentioned above. Ask the candidates if they are able to:

• Deliver clarity on product market fit in Singapore, which enterprise segment , industry, geographies and margins? And, develop pricing strategies for solution selling ?
• Develop together with PR and Content Marketing - whitepapers, slides , training materials for a high level engagement with global partners ?
• Attend customer and partner meetings, develop whitepapers, slides, training materials for channel partners?
• Represent us at conferences / meetups ? What type of conferences are value creator for us and our product ?
• Engage clients, which type of clients - C suite ? In what type of organizations, etc

Final questions

Over the past 6 months, I have tried my hand at giving out pro-bono advice, based on the mistakes made and the lessons learnt while scaling ‘tech unicorn’ teams. 

I have spoken to founders and tech leads in food tech, HR tech, digital media, telcos, SAAS startups, and I found that many who are totally new to interviewing and picking the right talent for the growth stage of their startup, have often made these mistakes at early-stage hiring:

You hired people who seemed like the right fit - but actually they don’t contribute 

You spend too much time trying to retain people who could benefit from leaving (for a variety of reasons)

Here are some questions to ask yourself, first, to determine if you are not traveling down the wrong path :

Do you know how to evaluate the right talent for your growth stage ?

Can you spot the career gaps in their CV, or how they are trying to make a career progression, are you able to cover the basic facts such as : reasons for leaving or for joining particular organizations, are you able to identify their achievements and ask the right questions around it - asking about the accounts that they have developed, the performance ratings they have been given, and the reasons for their successes or failures.

Are you able to assess their character ?

Can you pick up on definitive areas where they can show a compelling reason why they are right for the role, are you able to pick up on their people skills, at the end of the session are you able to know about their body language, and how about their ability to communicate ?

How about their strengths and weaknesses ? Without asking the obvious questions, are you able to get them to tell you about their strengths and weaknesses?

Do you know your purpose ?

Do you know the purpose of your interview round as well as the other interview rounds, what each round serves to evaluate, are you able to address the candidate’s concerns, identify what are their desired positions? Are they realistic in their expectations ? What are they looking to get out of this role with your company - get them to identify for themselves what sort of skills they are trying to develop in their time working together with you and your team.

I hope this sharing will be helpful for those of you wanting to grow your teams, and want to try the ‘hire for potential’ strategy. By giving this strategy a shot, we were not disappointed by the effort and momentum our young talents produced, and hope to see them grow into tech startup leaders helping other, future startups grow.

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“Make history or be a part of it” - Phil Knight