267 - No Limits - Hiring

Promotion vs prevention

We’re doing a lot of hiring at Mayday at the moment. It feels like a great time to write about the subject, both to share my learnings, as well as organise my thinking for practical application.

“No no, no no no no, no no no no, no no there's no limit”

The immortal words of 2 Unlimited provide a valuable startup hiring heuristic. When contemplating hiring a candidate, I need to be of a promotion vs prevention mindset. I need to be excited about the ways they may be able to add value to the team, not focused on their limitations.

When I talk about limits, I’m not talking about weaknesses per se. Perfection isn’t possible. Everyone has weaknesses. We want to identify them in the recruitment process and be comfortable they are not incompatible with our organisation. 

Limitations are when we’re whittling down the jobs we need to be done by the role to work around a candidate’s limitations: “We can’t have confidence in their ability to do X, but they can do Y. And we really need someone to do Y. I’ll just continue to do X myself”. 

I’ve been in this situation a few times now. It has always been an indicator that it is not right to hire that candidate. Those are straws that are not meant to be clutched at. 

There is a subtle but different situation. Where you meet a candidate whose abilities and limitations make you realise that there is a different way of translating the jobs you’re hiring to be done into different roles. That absolutely can work. But when there are jobs to be done that absolutely should sit with a particular role and you’re having to narrow that role and remove some of those jobs to fit a person’s limitations, then the answer is always a no.