The role had been open for three months when a designer sat down for her interview and asked me something I’d never heard in a hiring conversation.
What problem are you trying to solve by hiring another designer with my skillset?
I was baffled. We had interviewed about 600 applicants for that role, and nobody had asked.
So I asked her right back. What did she know about our business, and beyond the obvious fact that we were short on talent, what problems could she solve?
Her questions made it clear she was far ahead of all 600 applicants, and her answers confirmed it.
Later that day I worked out what had happened. We needed someone strong and independent, senior enough to take initiative, mentor people, and carry their own work. We had never assessed any of that.
We had been checking candidates against a spec sheet. The opening itself was one, because nobody had asked what the role was for. Including me.
A spec sheet is safe. Nobody gets criticized for hiring the best on paper, and since you can’t judge actual performance until the person starts, nobody gets blamed either.
When it goes wrong, the company pays. That includes the time and energy the team has invested, and that is money.
Fighter pilot and strategist John Boyd argued that a mental model that only talks to itself drifts away from reality. A résumé is exactly that: a model of a person that never checks itself against what the other side needs. She checked.
After her, we changed how we hired. We leaned into motivational interviewing, open questions that push past someone’s first answer. We interviewed the references of our strongest candidates instead of sending them a survey form. The whole process became far more engaging.
Jiu-Jitsu has the same pattern. Most of the best people don’t carry a wide range of techniques. They have one or two go-to strategies they’ve spent years refining, so well that everyone around them calls those techniques fundamentals, even simple. They forget that simple isn’t easy.
I’ve seen it in interviews too, where impressive CVs lose to people with narrower skills and a deeper grasp of the business they want to join.
She got the role. She was fantastic.