Every Hire Is a Projection

Seeing that roles vary is the easy half. The hard half is deciding how much of a particular person's record transfers to the particular job you have.

Even the perfect-looking hire is a projection. Their last company wasn't yours — different product, different buyer, different stage, different resources behind them. Exact experience doesn't remove the leap. It shortens it.

So the question isn't whether to project. It's where you can afford to.

Two filters

What does this role turn on? The thing that, done badly, sinks it. And of those things, which can't be learned in the time you have?

The second filter is relative, not absolute. A company with two years of margin can teach more than one with two quarters. Nothing is unteachable on your runway.

What falls into both is what you have to buy. Everything else is a plan. But that plan depends on the person having the aptitude to learn what they're missing.

Projecting a long way on purpose

I've hired nurses into sales roles selling to providers. The job turned on understanding how a provider organization is structured and how clinicians talk — critical, and years to acquire. Selling was also critical, and we could teach it, provided the candidate had the aptitude.

Same reasoning with diligence managers out of Big Four accounting into strategic analysts: the accounting baseline and a skeptical, curious mind had to arrive in the door. Bottom-up modeling and facilitating a business review we built.

Those are long projections, taken deliberately. The distance was short in the thing that couldn't be taught and long in the thing that could.

When the role isn't knowable yet

Sometimes you can't name what the role turns on, because the business hasn't decided. The model is unproven, the motion unclear, the role still changing.

At that stage, hire athletes: range, learning speed, judgment, the ability to operate without structure. You're projecting across a wide gap on purpose, because there's no narrow one available.

Once the model hardens and the work is known, the justification for long projections gets weaker. Startups have little room for long learning curves and no redundancy when a critical hire fails. The cost isn't the compensation. It's six months of lost execution, followed by another search.

Decide before the search opens

The failure mode here is a job description with ten must-have requirements. That's evidence nobody decided which ones matter — and it produces a search that finds nobody, until the company gets tired and hires out of relief.

Name the two or three things that must be true. Sometimes they're experiences: built an enterprise sales team from ten reps to fifty, sold through channel partners, took a finance function from spreadsheets to a real close process. Sometimes they're capabilities that can be demonstrated through different experiences.

Those are what you're buying. Treat the rest as a selection rather than a checklist: demonstrate three of the five, not all five.

Then hold the line in the room. Every important question should test something you decided mattered before the candidate walked in. Otherwise, you're not evaluating against a standard. You're letting the candidate redefine the standard.

You're going to project either way. Decide where.