What I Wish I Knew Before My First Hire.

I remember sitting across from my first ever candidate and thinking, I have absolutely no idea what I am doing.

I had prepared questions. I wrote them down the night before, very seriously, in a notebook. Questions about strengths and weaknesses and where they saw themselves in five years. All the classics. All completely useless, as it turned out.

The interview lasted forty five minutes. I offered them the job on the way out. They accepted. I went back to my desk feeling like a proper CEO.

Three months later I was having the kind of conversations I did not know how to have yet. Six months later I was starting the whole process again and wondering what exactly had gone wrong and whether it was them or me.

It was me. Mostly.

You are not hiring a person. You are making a bet.

Here is what nobody tells you before your first hire. You do not actually know if someone can do the job until they are doing the job. The interview is not a test of performance. It is a test of how well someone performs in interviews. And those are two completely different skills.

The person who is brilliant in the room is not always the person who is brilliant in the role. And the person who seems slightly awkward across a table might be the most quietly excellent operator you ever hired.

I have made both mistakes. Hired the energy and lost the output. Passed on the quiet one and watched them go on to do remarkable things somewhere else. Both sting in different ways.

The honest truth is that hiring is a bet. You are placing a wager with incomplete information, under time pressure, on a human being who is also performing their best version of themselves for sixty minutes. The best you can do is make a more informed bet. Not a certain one.

Skills you can teach. Character you cannot.

This took me longer than it should have to understand.

I used to hire for capability first. Can they do the job. Do they have the experience. Do the credentials check out. And those things matter. Of course they do.

But I have sat across from people with impeccable CVs who could not handle being wrong. Who shut down when things got uncertain. Who performed brilliantly when everything was clear and fell apart when it was not.

And I have hired people who looked slightly underqualified on paper but who were honest about what they did not know, curious enough to figure it out, and resilient enough to keep going when it got hard.

The second group, almost without exception, built better careers and added more value. Not because skills do not matter. Because skills without character have a very low ceiling in a growing business.

Hire for who they are. You can teach almost everything else.

The reference call is not a formality.

I used to treat reference calls like a box to tick. A five minute conversation with someone the candidate had pre-selected to say nice things about them. Polite, pointless, and quickly forgotten.

I was wrong.

The reference call, done properly, is one of the most valuable parts of the whole process. Not the version where you ask, was this person a good employee and they say yes, absolutely, great to work with, highly recommend. The version where you ask, what is the one thing this person needs to work on most. Where did they struggle? How did they handle a situation that went wrong?

People will tell you the truth if you ask the right questions. And the truth in those moments is worth more than anything that comes out of the interview itself.

What I actually look for now.

I look for people who are honest about what they do not know. Candidates who come in and tell me confidently that they know everything are the ones I trust the least. The ones who say I have not done exactly this but here is how I would approach it, those are the ones I lean toward.

I look for how they talk about the places they have worked before. Not whether they loved every job. But whether they take any responsibility for the things that did not go well. The candidate who has a villain in every previous chapter is usually the common thread in their own story.

And I look for curiosity. Whether they have questions that go beyond salary and title. Whether they have done enough research to ask something that surprises me. Whether they seem genuinely interested in the problem or just in the role.

None of this is foolproof. Hiring never is. But it is considerably better than a notebook full of where you see yourself in five years.

The first hire teaches you more about hiring than any book ever will. Mine certainly did.

I just wish it had been a slightly less expensive education.

Regards,
Rupesh