Hiring is the highest-leverage thing an engineering leader does. Everything else — culture, velocity, quality — flows downstream of who is in the room. And yet most hiring processes optimize for the wrong signal.
They optimize for the résumé: the brand names, the years, the keyword match. These are easy to read and feel objective. They are also a measurement of the past, and you are hiring for the future.
Skills age, thinking compounds
The specific skills on a résumé have a half-life, and it keeps getting shorter. The framework someone mastered three years ago may be a liability today. What doesn't age is how they think — their ability to learn quickly, reason from first principles, and own a problem end to end.
This is what I mean by trajectory: not where someone is, but how fast they're moving and in what direction. A candidate two years into a steep climb will often outperform one ten years into a plateau, even when the second has the more impressive CV.
What trajectory looks like
Concretely, I'm looking for three things:
- Ownership. Do they talk about outcomes or activities? When something broke, did they treat it as theirs to fix or someone else's to blame?
- Curiosity. Do they understand why the systems they worked on were built that way, or just that they were? Curiosity is the engine of the whole climb.
- Learning in public. Can they tell you about a time they were wrong, what they learned, and how it changed them? The willingness to be wrong on the way to being right is the single best predictor I know.
The best engineers I've hired were rarely the most obvious on paper. Skills age; the way someone thinks compounds.
Build a process that can see it
Here's the catch: most interview processes are structurally incapable of detecting trajectory. A trivia-style technical screen measures what someone already knows. A take-home that rewards polish measures who had a free weekend.
To hire for trajectory you have to design for it:
- Give problems with no clean answer and watch how they navigate ambiguity.
- Ask them to teach you something they understand deeply — depth of thinking shows immediately.
- Probe past decisions: what they'd do differently, and why.
You're not testing for the right answer. You're testing for the quality of the reasoning that gets there.
The cultural dividend
Hiring this way does something beyond filling the role. It sets the standard for what your organization values. When you promote and reward trajectory, you tell everyone that growth is the point — that being wrong on the way to being right is safe, and that learning out loud is how you get ahead.
That message compounds, too. The teams I'm proudest of weren't built from the most impressive résumés. They were built from people on a steep climb, in an environment that kept them climbing.