How to hire for Director+ roles?
<p>Hiring folks in leadership roles is very challenging. One difficulty is that almost every candidate who gets to that level is generally good at communication, charismatic in their demeanor, and well trained to say the right things to get the job. Nonetheless, there is a huge difference between how people interview and how they deliver once they get hired. In my interactions with folks in Director+ roles, I generally find a very strong dichotomy, with a few individuals being superstars and a large majority having some level of non-pathological narcissism, where they got to a leadership position primarily because they knew how to play the game of visibility. Given all this, how do you break the level of information asymmetry in interviews and hire exceptional leaders for technical roles?</p>
<h1>Do they have an understanding of the P&L?</h1>
<p>A good Director+ is able to look at a profit and loss statement and translate that into a technical direction. For example, a Head of Data could look at a financial statement and immediately ask questions:</p>
<ul>
<li>It looks like our cost of acquisition is high. Who is leading that work? What optimization has been done to make that more efficient? Nobody? I would like to assign a data scientist who specializes in optimization to work on it.</li>
<li>It looks like our infrastructure costs are growing at a higher rate than revenue. What are the drivers of that cost? Who is responsible for infra? Nobody? I would like to personally lead a Cloud FinOps initiative.</li>
<li>It looks like our runway is unhealthy. Is it time to make tough decisions?</li>
<li>It looks like our business is growing, but operations work is not scaling. Who is responsible for automating that?</li>
</ul>
<p>If you give a candidate a situational interview where you go over a simplified P&L and they are not able to ask questions and tie that to technical solutions, it should tell you two things:</p>
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