One of the most rewarding (and challenging) parts of building a company is forming a great team. This is even more challenging with remote hiring. In the early days, we’re all striving to find the elusive product/market fit. But in order to build a lasting company or product(s) that exceed our customers needs, we need to first start with a strong foundation for growth; a solid team.While growing our team at Continu, we’ve realized one of the biggest attributes to look for in candidates is passion. Passionate people break down barriers and find the best solutions to problems – they are hungry to learn and develop their experience and they seek out the hard tasks in the best interest of the company/product.
Unfortunately, Passion isn’t the easiest thing to quantify. You can’t test for it in a quiz or read about it in a resume. So in order to find truly passionate people, we’ve identified a few techniques which have helped us learn which candidates to pay close attention to:
Look Past the Resume
It’s important not to put too much emphasis on a resume. At the end of the day a resume only highlights past experiences and doesn’t necessarily translate to future performance. It's a good guide to show track record of a candidate, but shouldn’t be the only determining factor. Instead, we turn to other hints about the person, like a side project they might be working on or a link to a social site that might give us insight into their interests and hobbies. It's often the things that people do outside of their work life that highlights what they are truly passionate about and motivated by.
While growing our team at Continu, we’ve realized one of the biggest attributes to look for in candidates is passion.
Seek Problem Solvers
Whether you’re seeking engineers, designers or biz dev folks; finding problem solvers that can think creatively is key. We don’t run traditional tests during interviews and instead ask questions to prompt immediate problem solving. Will a candidate try to solve a design problem we’ve discussed with them without being prompted? How do they think about a certain process and how would they improve it? How have they worked with others in the past to solve challenging problems outside of their role? These are all things we look for when trying to find real problem solvers. We seek doers that are curious and hungry to find answers.