Hire the person who's still climbing

Elena Verna wrote about the rise of the AI-native employee five weeks into her time at Lovable. Most of the AI-native people she met were young, “fresh out of school, sometimes not even graduated yet.” She calls that their superpower. They aren’t weighed down by approval chains or the belief that things just take time. In a later piece on hiring she adds: “People with limited experience aren’t always right, but they usually have great perspective that is generally suppressed in most organizations.”

Kun Chen reached E7 at Meta and partner level at Microsoft. He told Steve Huynh, for A Life Engineered, that he asks himself this every month. Most people wait for a stalled promotion to notice they’ve stopped growing. You can borrow it in an interview: what can this person do now that they couldn’t do a year ago?

Together we built an automated HR audit that now saves hours for every client. It was a real product, built by two people, and it worked. There’s a note to my future self in an old LinkedIn post, and it still holds: always give back to students who are hungry to learn.

Molly Graham was an early employee at Google and Facebook, then COO at Quip. In a guest post for Lenny’s Newsletter, she says her early career rules were learning, people and mission. Learning meant “a curve so steep I was terrified.” Claire Hughes Johnson, former COO of Stripe, keeps two words as her compass: learning and impact. In an interview, listen for that pull. Has this person picked the steep curve before?

Tell them! Better still, give them a shot at something real: a project, an introduction, or a seat in a meeting they wouldn’t normally get. People did that for me, and I’m very grateful. Then reply and tell me about them. I love hearing about people on the way up.