To avoid the trap of hiring 'good enough' people, make the interview panel explicitly state which current employee the candidate surpasses. This forces a concrete comparison and ensures every new hire actively raises the company's overall talent level, preventing a slow, imperceptible decline in quality.

Before hiring for a critical function, founders should do the job themselves, even if they aren't experts. The goal isn't mastery, but to deeply understand the role's challenges. This experience is crucial for setting a high hiring bar and being able to accurately assess if a candidate will truly up-level the team.

To simulate interview coaching, feed your written answers to case study questions into an LLM. Prompt it to score you on a specific rubric (structured thinking, user focus, etc.), identify exact weak phrases, explain why, and suggest a better approach for structured, actionable feedback.

For leadership roles, the interview itself is a critical test. If the candidate isn't teaching you something new about their function, it's a red flag. A true leader should bring expertise that elevates your understanding. If you have to teach them, they will consume your time rather than create leverage.

For roles where you hire for personality and train skills from scratch (like HVAC techs), traditional recruiting is inefficient. Use local ads to generate high volume and group interviews to quickly triage candidates and identify the right cultural fit before moving to one-on-ones.

The "attitude vs. aptitude" debate is flawed. Instead, hire the person with the smallest skill deficiency relative to the role's requirements. For a cashier, attitude is the harder skill to train. For an AI researcher, technical aptitude is. The key question is always: is it worth our resources to train this specific gap?

For high-level leadership roles, skip hypothetical case studies. Instead, present candidates with your company's actual, current problems. The worst-case scenario is free, high-quality consulting. The best case is finding someone who can not only devise a solution but also implement it, making the interview process far more valuable.

Ineffective interviews try to catch candidates failing. A better approach models a collaborative rally: see how they handle challenging questions and if they can return the ball effectively. The goal is to simulate real-world problem-solving, not just grill them under pressure.

Beyond IQ and EQ, interview for 'Resilience Quotient' (RQ)—the ability to persevere through setbacks. A key tactic is to ask candidates about their proudest achievement, then follow up with, 'What would you do differently?' to see how they navigated strife and learned from it.