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Why Founders Must Learn to Listen During Interviews

(Also known as "Shut Up And Get Curious!")

Our job is helping leaders become exceptional at evaluating talent. One of the hardest (but most rewarding) parts is breaking bad habits. 

There is one bad habit we encounter with very high frequency, especially amongst startup founders. They...

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Founders: Your Success Is A Function Of Your First 5 Hires

If you’ve started a new business, or are thinking of doing so, there are no shortage of books, courses and coaches available to tell you what to focus on in those critical early years. 

I would encourage you to talk to 10 founders, especially those that have done it more than once. Ask...

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4 Hours to Save 400: The Ultimate Time Leverage

Thought experiment: If there were a "leverage machine" where you could invest 4 hours and get 400 hours of free time back in your life each year. Would you play that game?

Put money aside for a moment. Even though we all know a great hire will add way more value to your...

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Startup Hiring: 6 Key Traits
The ideal hire for a startup can differ quite a bit from what a large company needs. Here are 6 traits that are especially important to consider when hiring for your startup. These go beyond the obvious things like experience, intelligence, honesty, and generally liking the person. 

  1. Comfort...
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Weaknesses: Are They Just Overexpressed Strengths?

Weaknesses. Development priorities. Areas for improvement. Call them what you want—we all have them. Some are career-limiting (lack of drive) and some may be minor annoyances (overtalking). Some are intractable (ethical gaps) and some are quite addressable (lack of domain...

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Video Interviewing

More and more interviews are being done on Zoom: during the initial (screening) stages it doesn’t make sense to invest financially and logistically to fly a candidate on-site. For remote-first organizations, that is doubly true.

But remote (video) interviewing introduces a risk—will...

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Passivity

Let me be clear: there are a lot of ways that someone can be a bad interviewer. But once we remove the most obvious (and egregious) ones—berating the candidate, being a complete jerk, being late, and being distracted on your phone, etc.—there is one interviewing fail mode that has a...

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Stay at 20%

There is one common mistake I see in my coaching clients who otherwise have solid rapport: they go too “flat” when they are listening to the candidate’s story. They are typically fairly engaged with great rapport when delivering their questions but that rapport energy drops off...

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Hard Questions

We spoke a couple of weeks ago about examining your pet questions and putting them through a Talgo filter to see if they are really giving you the data you think they are.

There is one class of question that I want to draw special attention to: the “hard” interview question. This is a...

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