Michael Zhang’s Post

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2x founder | Helping startups hire uniquely entrepreneurial talent

"And then in my second year, I took on the project again." Great hires do the hard work that stymies others. One of the reasons I love being a search professional is that I get to hear about the exceptional work done in orgs that are already considered quite high-performing. Just today I spoke to a candidate who took on a technically complex project. This project was so complex, that in past years other people had led it once and burned out. But she wasn't going to be stopped by the challenge -- she wanted it to get a forecasting engine a highly impactful state where it could be useful year after year, rather than needing to be rebuilt from scratch. So the first year taught her all she needed to know about how hard it was. And when the second year came up, she volunteered to lead the initiative -- and this time take it from accretive gains to a transformative reworking. As founders aim to hires who can inflect the growth curves at a company, this is the kind of example that stands out as extrordinary. Amidst a team of ambitious high performers, what made someone go the extra mile? Knowing a project could lead to failure, what led someone to take it on? Not having to do something, why would someone excitedly volunteer for the tougher challenge? How a candidate speaks to all of this gets at their core DNA and motivations, and gives a peek at how they might tackle similar situations at their next startup. So in the end, it comes down one simple thing: It's not always about what someone did. It's about what someone did that made them exceptional, especially in the company of impressive peers.

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