Hire for trajectory, not pedigree

Over a five-year horizon, trajectory wins every single time without exception -- the only real question is whether you can spot the slope in a thirty-minute interview, when both candidates are dressed for the same job and trained on the same answers, and the difference between them is the one number nobody wrote on the résumé.

Two roles at the same title across four years isn’t a flat line, it’s a stalled one -- and three different scopes in three years, each meaningfully harder than the last and each one taken on without being asked, is the kind of line you should be willing to pay above market for, because the next two years on it are going to look nothing like the previous two.

What I look for is the shape of the curve rather than the height of the last point: what someone learned in each role, how quickly they learned it, and whether each step was bigger than the one before. Two people can read almost identically on paper and be moving at completely different speeds. The one still climbing is the better bet, which is the same instinct as shipping early: momentum tells you more than a finished-looking surface.

The slope was unmistakable once I stopped reading horizontally and started reading vertically -- each role twice as hard as the previous one, each transition self-initiated rather than prompted, and the curve pointing in exactly the direction the role is going to need by year two -- so I bet on the line, not the addresses on it, and I’m expecting a strong year-one ramp because the line says I should.

Hit reply -- I’m collecting the best ones into an interview-question library and the most useful answers tend to come not from the recruiters but from the hiring managers who got it right once and have been trying to reverse-engineer how ever since.