I have hired well. I have hired badly. I have hired people who changed the trajectory of a company and people who cost me a year of momentum before I accepted what was obvious to everyone else by month three.
Looking back across all of it, the bad hires are not random. They have a pattern. And the pattern is not what most founders talk about.
It is not skills. Skills can be taught, or bought, or worked around. I have seen people with spectacular resumes produce almost nothing in an environment they were not built for. I have seen people with half the credentials outperform every expectation because they were wired for the work.
The pattern is something closer to character. Specifically: how a person handles being wrong.
What I was optimising for
For most of my career I hired on a combination of competence and chemistry. Could they do the job. Did I want to be in a room with them.
Both of those things matter. Neither of them is sufficient.
The problem with competence is that it is a lagging indicator. Someone looks competent in an interview because they are telling you about things they have already done. What you cannot see is how they behave when something does not work, when the plan falls apart, when they make a call and it turns out to be wrong.
The problem with chemistry is that it is often just familiarity. You like people who think the way you think. Which means you keep hiring the same kind of person, which means you keep having the same kinds of blind spots, which compounds in ways that only become visible later.
The question I now ask
I have one question I come back to in almost every serious hiring conversation.
Tell me about a time you were completely wrong about something at work. Not wrong in a way that was someone else's fault, or wrong because the information changed. Wrong because your judgment was off.
What I am listening for is not the story. It is what they do with it.
Some people cannot find the example. That is information. Some people find it instantly but spend the whole answer redirecting blame in subtle ways. That is information too.
The people I want to hire tell the story cleanly, take ownership without theatre, and then tell me what changed in how they think because of it. Not what they learned to do differently. How they actually think differently now.
That is intellectual honesty. It is the rarest thing in a hiring process where everyone is performing competence. And it is the best predictor I have found for how someone will actually behave when things get hard.
What it costs to get this wrong
Bad hires are expensive in ways that do not show up on a spreadsheet. The salary is the smallest part of it. The cost is in the decisions that do not get made, the culture that drifts, the good people who leave because the environment changed, the months you spend managing around someone instead of building forward.
I have never regretted moving slowly on a hire. I have regretted moving fast on more than a few.
Ask the question. Listen carefully. The way someone talks about being wrong tells you almost everything you need to know about how they will operate when they are inside your company and the stakes are real.