For founders
Make every must-have earn its place.
A requirement should explain a risk in the job. Familiarity alone is a poor reason to exclude someone.
Published
A requirement is a prediction.
Calling something a must-have means you expect a person to fail at a particular part of the job without it. Name that failure. If you cannot, the requirement may be a familiar proxy that nobody has challenged.
Experience with a tool, knowledge of a business problem and the ability to learn a new system are separate things. Requiring all three may feel safer. It can also remove people whose strongest experience transfers to the work you actually need done.
Compare the gaps you would have to close.
Neither profile wins automatically. First decide which gap is central to the job. A new tool may be teachable if the underlying problem is familiar. The reverse can be harder when the hire must diagnose the problem without much help.
Ask each person to explain a relevant decision. Then check whether the reasoning transfers to your constraints. A convincing explanation includes where the analogy breaks. The candidate who recognizes that boundary may understand the work better than the one who treats every context as the same.
Keep the bar explicit when you change the filter.
Waive exact-tool experience only when the candidate demonstrates the underlying capability and the team can support a defined ramp. If neither condition holds, keep the requirement or change the mandate. Do not waive both tool experience and problem knowledge simply to keep an impressive profile in the search.
Try the same discipline when rejecting a profile. “Not senior enough” becomes useful only when you can name the decision they have not shown they can make. If the reason keeps changing, revisit the brief before scaling outreach.
Try this
Audit one must-have
Choose the requirement that has eliminated the most otherwise relevant profiles. Complete these lines before your next calibration.
- The requirement we currently insist on:
- The failure in the actual job that it is meant to prevent:
- The underlying capability we still need:
- Different experience that could demonstrate that capability:
- The question or work sample that would change our view: