Hiring
Recruiting, interviewing, and building the right team
Week 22 Day 1: Most Interviews Measure Confidence, Not Competence
The standard technical interview is a confidence test disguised as a competence test. The most articulate candidate wins, not the most capable one....
Week 22 Day 2: The Resume Is the Least Useful Part of Hiring
Resumes tell you where someone has been. They tell you nothing about how they behaved while they were there....
Week 22 Day 3: Behavioral Questions That Reveal Character
The right behavioral questions do not ask 'what would you do?' -- they ask 'what did you do?' Hypotheticals reveal intentions. Behavior reveals character....
Week 22 Day 4: How to Detect Rehearsed Answers vs. Real Experience
The most dangerous candidates are the ones who have practiced their stories so thoroughly that fiction sounds indistinguishable from experience. But there are tells....
Week 22 Day 5: The Three Traits That Predict Long-Term Success
After two decades of hiring, three traits consistently predict who will succeed on a team over the long term: intellectual humility, follow-through, and the ability to receive feedback without defensi...
Week 22 Day 6: Why Technical Skills Are Trainable but Character Is Not
You can teach someone a new programming language in three months. You cannot teach them to care about their teammates in three years....
Week 22 Day 7: Assignment: Rewrite Your Next Interview to Be 80% Behavioral
This week's assignment transforms your interview process -- take your next scheduled interview and restructure it so that 80% of the questions are behavioral....
Week 23 Day 1: 'Culture Fit' Is Often Code for 'Thinks Like Us'
When a hiring panel says a candidate is 'not a culture fit,' they usually mean the candidate is different from the people already on the team. That is not a reason to reject someone -- it is a reason ...
Week 23 Day 2: What You Actually Want Is Culture Add
Culture add asks: 'What does this person bring that we do not already have?' The answer is what makes teams smarter, more resilient, and harder to disrupt....
Week 23 Day 3: Diversity of Thought Requires Diversity of People
You cannot get diverse thinking from homogeneous teams. The backgrounds, experiences, and identities of your team members determine the range of solutions they can imagine....
Week 23 Day 4: How to Interview for Different Perspectives
Interviewing for culture add requires asking different questions than interviewing for culture fit. You are looking for complementarity, not similarity....
Week 23 Day 5: The Team That Agrees on Everything Is a Team That Misses Everything
If your team never disagrees, you do not have alignment. You have conformity. And conformity is the enemy of every form of excellence....
Week 23 Day 6: When Culture Add Feels Uncomfortable -- That Is the Point
The person who challenges your thinking will make you uncomfortable. The person who confirms your thinking will make you feel good. The first one makes your team better. The second one makes it more f...
Week 23 Day 7: Assignment: Review Your Last Three Hires for Pattern Bias
This week's assignment holds a mirror up to your hiring history -- examine your last three hires to identify whether you have been hiring for similarity rather than complementarity....
Week 24 Day 1: Every Great Leader Has Questions Only They Ask
The best leaders develop signature interview questions -- questions refined through hundreds of conversations that reveal something no standard question can reach....
Week 24 Day 2: The Question That Reveals How Someone Handles Failure
How a candidate describes their failures tells you more about their character than how they describe their successes. The failure question is the most diagnostic tool in your interview arsenal....
Week 24 Day 3: The Question That Reveals How Someone Learns
The speed and quality of a person's learning determines their long-term value to a team. One question can tell you whether someone learns deliberately or accidentally....
Week 24 Day 4: The Question That Reveals How Someone Treats People
How a candidate talks about former colleagues and managers tells you exactly how they will talk about you and your team in two years....
Week 24 Day 5: Building a Question Library That Evolves With You
Your best interview questions will come from your worst hiring mistakes. Every time someone fails on your team, there is a question you did not ask that would have predicted it....
Week 24 Day 6: Reference Checks That Actually Work
Most reference checks confirm what you already know. The reference check that changes a hiring decision is one that asks questions the candidate cannot prepare the reference to answer....
Week 24 Day 7: Assignment: Develop Three Signature Questions
This week's assignment creates your personal interview toolkit -- develop three signature questions that target the traits you value most and commit to testing them in your next ten interviews....
Week 25 Day 1: The Difference Between Passion and Persistence
Passion gets people started. Persistence gets things finished. The leader who hires for passion alone builds a team of starters with no finishers....
Week 25 Day 2: How to Spot a Finisher in an Interview
Finishers reveal themselves through the details. The candidate who can describe the last 10% of a project -- the unglamorous, exhausting, detail-heavy final push -- has earned the right to call themse...
Week 25 Day 3: Tenacity Is Not Stubbornness
Tenacity means persisting through difficulty toward the right goal. Stubbornness means persisting through difficulty toward any goal, including the wrong one. The difference is the willingness to chan...
Week 25 Day 4: Why the Best Hires Have Survived Something Difficult
Adversity does not build character -- it reveals it. The candidate who has survived something genuinely difficult brings a resilience to your team that no training program can replicate....
Week 25 Day 5: The Grit Scale Is Not Enough -- Look for Evidence
Self-reported grit is unreliable. Real grit is visible in the record: projects completed, commitments honored, difficult seasons endured. Do not ask people if they are gritty -- look at what they have...
Week 25 Day 6: Building a Team of Finishers Changes Everything
A team of finishers ships. A team of starters iterates endlessly. The difference between the two is the most consequential hiring pattern a leader controls....
Week 25 Day 7: Assignment: Create Your Tenacity Assessment Rubric
This week's assignment builds a structured rubric for evaluating tenacity in candidates -- converting the signals from this week into a repeatable scoring framework....
Week 48 Day 1: You Are Hiring on Vibes and It Is Costing You
Most leaders hire on intuition. They call it 'culture fit' or 'gut feeling' or 'I just know a good candidate when I see one.' What they actually mean is: I liked this person during the interview. Liki...
Week 48 Day 2: The Hiring Scorecard: Behaviors, Skills, and Culture Add
The Hiring Scorecard has three sections. Section one: key behaviors -- the observable actions that predict success in this specific role. Section two: technical skills -- the capabilities required to ...
Week 48 Day 3: How to Score Candidates Objectively
The scorecard only works if you score honestly. Most leaders score generously -- they avoid low scores because it feels harsh, they inflate scores for candidates they liked, and they find reasons to j...
Week 48 Day 4: The Roadmap Template: How to Plan a Quarter in 90 Minutes
Most roadmap planning takes too long and produces documents that are outdated within weeks. The issue is not that planning is hard -- it is that most planning processes try to achieve certainty instea...
Week 48 Day 5: Running the 90-Minute Roadmap Session
The roadmap template is only useful if the session is well facilitated. A poorly run session produces the same output as no session at all: a list of things that sound important to the person who spok...
Week 48 Day 6: Planning Is Essential, Plans Are Useless
Eisenhower said it: 'Plans are useless, but planning is essential.' The roadmap you created will be partially wrong by week 4. That is fine. The value is not in the document -- it is in the shared und...
Week 48 Day 7: Assignment: Build a Hiring Scorecard for Your Next Open Role
This week's assignment: build a complete Hiring Scorecard for a role you are currently hiring for or expect to hire for in the next quarter. If you have no open roles, build a scorecard for the next r...