Office Hours: "How do I hire against the resume?"

A founder asked me this after a senior hire went sideways. Here's the answer I gave in class — the one that saves you six months and a severance package.

The question, roughly as it came in: “I can finally afford a real hire. Should I go for the person with the brand-name resume?”

Quick Answer: the resume tells you what someone was allowed to do at their last job — not what they’ll do at yours. Hire for behavior under ambiguity, and read the resume last.

First, the principle. At a big company, the machine does half the work. The calendar fills itself, the process exists, the decisions arrive pre-narrowed. So when you hire the impressive logo, you’re often hiring the machine’s output, not the person’s. Then they land at your company — no machine, no process, nobody defining the job — and they wait for inputs that never come. That’s not a character flaw. It’s a category error: you hired a resume built by an environment you don’t have.

What you’re actually hiring for at a startup is what someone does when nobody has defined the job. You won’t find that on the resume, but you can find it in the room. Give them a real problem you have right now — not a brainteaser, an actual open question from your week — and watch what they do with it. Do they ask the questions that narrow it, or perform confidence at it? Do they say “here’s what I’d do Monday” or “here’s how I’d think about frameworks”? Do they separate what they did from what their team did — honestly, unprompted? The interview isn’t a test of the answer. It’s a preview of the Tuesday afternoon eight weeks from now when something breaks and you’re not in the building.

Now the story…

Whether at the strategy consulting firm I co-founded or the fitness company I helped build, there have been a couple of times when the person sitting in front of me gave me a gut feeling that hiring them would be a phenomenally good decision. Seven or eight years after inception, my strategy consulting firm [Acquis] was in high-growth mode, and we were hiring constantly. I helped shape the vision for what became our iterative, custom recruiting process, whose principles we often applied during on-campus recruiting as well. One of the schools where we were holding an information session was not considered a top-20 school in the US. However, one of my colleagues was an alum, so we had scheduled a recruiting slot. A senior undergraduate student approached me after the session, and we had a very interesting conversation. We subsequently invited him to our NY offices for interviews and ultimately made him an offer. He mentioned that he already had an offer from IBM, and the security of that much larger, more established company was hard to pass up as a new graduate, so he ended up working there. We stayed in touch over the coming months and ultimately, through numerous discussions, made him another offer, which he accepted and left IBM for Acquis - where he still works today! It wasn’t his résumé or the school he attended, but rather the insights he expressed through his questions — none of which were typical — that showed how interested he was not only in participating but also in contributing to our firm’s growth.

The flip side of this is another candidate that we made an offer to who ultimately didn’t accept, but for all the wrong reasons. Our financial offer exceeded his expectations, and everyone who had met him wanted him to join; however, his experience warranted a certain title, with the understanding that a year later we could assess the possibility of a promotion. Neither my cofounder nor I communicated that elevated title; rather, it was what he expected in the offer when he received it. Through discussions, I found that he simply could not let go of the title in his mind, which was ultimately unimportant to the role we wanted him to play in our company’s growth, so we rescinded the offer. We stood by our principles, and that made all the difference.

Here’s why I tell it. Every founder I’ve taught knows the pull of the impressive resume — it feels like de-risking, and it demos well to your investors. But the resume is a record of context, and you are not offering that context. You’re offering ambiguity, ownership, and a job that changes every quarter. Hire the person who has already done the job nobody gave them — at any scale, in any industry. That’s the trait that transfers.

So if you take one thing: read the resume last. Write down the three behaviors your next six months actually require, build the interview to surface them, and only then look at where the person has worked. The logo is the least interesting thing on the page.

Promise check. Everything I’ve published stays free — I don’t retro-gate, ever. Going forward the line is the one I drew when the doors closed: the question and my honest answer stay free. The full working — the spreadsheet, the build, the version applied to your race or your block — is member work. If you can read the whole argument without paying, I’ve kept my word.

That’s the argument — take it and hire better; it’s yours.
What sits below the line is the version you’d actually run: The Monday Worksheet — the three-behaviors exercise, the live-problem interview with the exact scoring table, the read-the-resume-last checklist, and the red flags that tell you you’re interviewing the machine instead of the person. It’s built to be used before your next interview goes on the calendar. If Open Tabs has earned it, this is what the member side is for.