The Perfect Candidate

Quote: “Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”

The Perfect Candidate

I recently went deep into hiring. Without counting exactly, I estimate that over a few months I did around 250+ calls, each 20 to 30 minutes long, with people applying for internships or full time positions at the startup I was working at. Throughout these calls, certain patterns started emerging. Some of them challenged beliefs I had held for a long time. With this hiring journey now coming to an end, I want to summarize what seemed to be the perfect candidate for us, and how I might reposition myself going forward to better resemble that picture.

Of course there are a lot of different jobs out there. Blue collar and white collar. Consulting and banking. Programming and sales. And of course all of these roles require certain hard skills. However, I truly believe that the ideal candidate we were looking for at our startup would also be the ideal candidate in a lot of other environments. So what are we actually talking about here?

In our hiring conversations, we were essentially looking for 3 things.

1. Personal fit:

I always ask myself one question about candidates I talk to: "Would I want to work with this person alone on a Friday evening at 8pm?" If yes, great. If no, it is an instant rejection. Of course this question gets answered differently by different people. But it still is essential. There is a saying that a company's culture throughout its entire lifetime is shaped by its first 50 hires. Therefore every hire is essential and has to be a perfect fit on a personal level.

To make this more concrete, here are a few instant red flags: Being too arrogant or overconfident. Not bringing enough energy or work ethic. And not being someone who is easy and fun to talk to. If I cannot crack a few jokes with you in the first call, that is not a good sign. Improving on all of these things is probably not easy and requires a lot of internal reflection and personal work. That is why it is even more important for us to hire people who already are a great fit.

2. Entrepreneurial Spirit:

The second criterion is that the candidate is entrepreneurial. We are looking for someone who is proactive and always ready to kick off new projects on their own. This is someone not just execucting on backoffice tasks, but someone that wants to know from the first day what our key KPIs are and then takes action on his own to drive these forward.

Of course this is easier said than done. That is why I put together a few concrete action points that help build this way of working in practice.

• Always call your manager directly when you are blocked on something important. Leaders are always busy but appreciate proactiveness.

• When waiting for approval, say something like: "Can you give me approval on X within Y hours, otherwise I will go ahead with Z." This way you stay unblocked without overstepping.

• Be proactive about your own goals. If you disagree with a goal given to you, come back with a counter proposal and argue why it better serves the company's objective.

• Figure out early how much budget you can spend independently and what the smoothest process is when you need to do so or need more.

A sentence that summarizes this kind of working is: "You are expected to get what you need to be successful." Someone who shows us that they will do that is a great hire. And the amount of incredible things I have seen interns do when they have this entrepreneurial drive in them is amazing.

3. Tier 1 Quality:

This third point is the one I struggled with accepting for the longest time. It felt like exactly the kind of traditional business school thinking I believed I had left behind in the startup world.

For those unfamiliar with the term, Tier 1 means that someone has worked at the most prestigious companies in a given field or attended a top ranked university. Think the three most recognized consultancies: McKinsey, BCG and Bain. Or universities like Harvard and Oxford. Every country and niche has these kinds of institutions that signal a certain level of excellence.

But working closely with a founder and team who had such a background convinced me that there is actually something to it. The two most important things a Tier 1 background signals are the following.

First, that the person knows what "great" looks like. How is someone supposed to work at an excellent level if they have never actually seen what that looks like in practice? It is not a binary thing, but rather a spectrum. And this background does not have to be a consultancy. This can also be someone with a past as a professional athlete or someone with a prestigious research background.

Second, people in these environments tend to go through a certain kind of school. They learn a specific way of working. Both in terms of work ethic, structuring their thoughts, presenting results and attention to detail. For someone with two years at a great consultancy, you can be sure that their work output will never fall below a certain standard.

Summary

When all of these things come together, you get someone who is hard working and ambitious but humble and helpful. Someone who has bold entrepreneurial ideas and no fear of trying them out, but who also executes on them with the structure, precision and cleanliness of a consultant.

To summarize, just being aware of these three things already helps. There is no need to obsess over every single point, and it is completely fine to lean more in one direction than another. But improving across all three areas is without a doubt a recipe for success.