“Remember that in a startup, anyone you hire is likely to be doing a new job in three to six months. Smart and effective people are adaptable.”
Hire For the Next Role, Not This One
From Sam Altman’s blog post “How to hire” on blog.samaltman.com. The line closes Altman’s section on why “smart and effective have got to be table stakes” in startup hiring; the preceding paragraph walks through how to probe for those two traits in an interview (most impressive projects, biggest wins, what they got done in the last month).
The line is the reason the questions in that section look the way they do. Altman never tells you to screen for fit to the open role; the interview he recommends asks how the candidate spends an average day and what they actually did on a project they ran themselves. Those questions ask what the candidate is, not where they slot in, because where they slot in won’t be the same in three to six months.