When I'm hiring senior people, I ask them one question.
Name one wonky person you bet on. One spike-and-valley person who turned out great for the company.
The answer tells me everything. If they can name one — the bet they took, the resistance from others, what worked — they're a spike hirer. If they hedge or generalise, they're a safety hirer. They will go on to hire flatland for me.
The question does double duty. It tells me whether they have the courage to take a real bet on a person. It also tells me whether they recognise a spike when they see one — because if they have never picked one, they probably cannot.
If someone asked me the same question, here is the answer I would give.
The candidate
Years ago I was interviewing someone for a senior role. The conversation was not smooth. It was not suave. I was not running the polished interview routine and he was not running the polished candidate routine.
At some point we stopped pretending the job was the point. We talked like two people who had no job at stake.
I asked him about a decision he had made earlier in his career. He answered. I said "I get you, but why would you do that, man?"
He said "yaar, I ask myself the same thing."
Then he walked me through what he would have done differently in hindsight, and why that version made more sense. He was not defending his old decision. He was already in dialogue with it. He was harder on himself than I would have been.
A few minutes later I raised a possibility he had not considered. He stopped, sat with it, and said "you know what, I didn't think of that. Now that you say it, I should have done X, and built Y on top of it."
He was not protecting his image. He saw the better idea and moved towards it immediately. The truth was more important to him than the pretence.
I hired him.
That conversation is what spike looks like when you can actually see it.
Why polished interviews cannot surface spike
Most senior interviews are theatre. Both sides are performing. The candidate gives the rehearsed version of their career. The interviewer gives the rehearsed version of due diligence. Both walk out feeling professional.
Nothing real happened.
The spiky candidate never reveals the spike to a polished panel. They give the rehearsed answer and walk out. The panel does not reject the spike. The panel never sees it.
The spike only comes out when the candidate stops performing. The candidate only stops performing when they sense the interviewer has stopped performing first. Here is a dude like me, let me drop the act.
This is the part of hiring that gets outsourced badly. If your interview panel is full of polished, well-rounded people — competent on every dimension, exceptional on none — the spiky candidate will never reveal themselves. Your panel will report back that the candidate was fine, no red flags, seemed competent. You will hire flatland and assume you ran a rigorous process.
You did not. You ran a process that systematically filters out the people you most needed to find.
What I actually look for
I never look at the college. Even when it is missing from the CV, I do not notice. I do not care.
I look at what someone did and how they moved. What challenges they took. What they learnt. How they dealt with adversity.
I look for hunger. Specifically — the right kind of hunger. A well-frustrated person, frustrated by what holds them back rather than by things not being smooth, catches my eye. I dig.
Hunger is the meta-signal. It is the energy that converts everything else into movement. A persistent person with no hunger plateaus. A reflective person with no hunger philosophises. Movement is the only reality. The rest is words and perception.
I wrote about this energy from a different angle in High-Functioning Is Not Well — anxiety as fuel, the thing that pushes someone with something to prove into useful motion. Same energy. Different conversation.
Then I check for a spike on at least one of these dimensions:
Persistence and resourcefulness. They figured it out without anyone telling them how. Nobody handed them anything. They taught themselves by toughing it out.
Ownership. They refused to get stuck at boundaries that were not theirs to own. They solved the problem in front of them, not the problem on their job description.
Reflection. They actually think about what they did and what could be better. Two kinds — backward reflection (yaar, I ask myself the same thing) and real-time reflection (you know what, I didn't think of that, here is what I would build on top of it). The rare ones do both.
Stakeholder sense. They understand people, not just problems.
One of these has to spike. The others can be passing. They can even be negative.
That last sentence is the part most panels cannot accept.
A winner is about how far they can stretch one dimension. The rest can be supported. Average is no spikes, all plains, and you will never get anywhere with that.
The valley is the deal
The best people I have worked with are wonky. They have a spike, and then they have valleys. Real valleys.
The most powerful ones are the people who built an ecosystem where their valleys were accepted and their team covered for them. I have written about this before from the leader's side — The Vulnerability Paradox was about the moment a team member says "don't worry about this part, boss, I've got it covered, you're not great at this anyway." That sentence is the test of arrival as a leader.
It is also the test of whether you have hired correctly in the first place.
If you hire people who are competent on every dimension and exceptional on none, there are no valleys to cover for and no spikes worth protecting. Everyone is fine. Nobody is essential. The team has no reason to rally around anyone in particular. The fan following never forms because there is nothing to be loyal to.
That sentence — "don't worry boss, you're not great at this anyway" — only happens in spike-and-valley organisations. In flatland, it is never spoken, because nobody is great at anything in particular and nobody is bad at anything in particular either.
You can only build a vulnerability-tolerant team if you hire people who have shortcomings worth covering for. Spike attracts spike. Polish attracts polish. The choice you make at the door determines what kind of org you wake up to in three years.
The senior-hire question, again
I started this piece with the question I ask senior hires. Name one wonky person you bet on.
I did not start there by accident. The question is a mirror. The senior hire who cannot answer it is telling you that they have built their career inside polished panels, picking polished candidates, never having to defend a difficult choice. They will reproduce that pattern under you.
The senior hire who answers it cleanly — with the specific person, the specific resistance, the specific payoff — is telling you something else. They have skin on this game. They have lost political capital defending someone difficult. They have watched the bet pay off. They know what spike looks like because they have seen it land.
That is the person you want hiring for you.
After I had been doing this for years, I read Peter Drucker. Turns out he had a clean name for what I was doing — staffing for strength. If you want the rigorous version of this argument, read his work on people decisions. He says it better than I will.
But here is the thing about reading him only after years of doing it. Drucker did not give me the framework. He validated one I had already built by watching what worked. The ego trip I had been on for years turned out to have a name. That was useful. It was not the source.
What I would do, if I am honest
Before the next interview, write down the one dimension that matters most for the job. Not five. One. The spike you are buying.
In the debrief, ask "what is this person world-class at?" before "what could go wrong?" Most panels do it the other way around and select for the absence of weakness. That is flatland's recruiting funnel running on autopilot.
Be unpolished enough in the interview that the candidate stops performing. The spike only shows up after the theatre stops. You cannot run a behavioural-interview script and expect to see spike. The script is exactly what filters spike out.
Stop outsourcing senior hires to panels of polished, well-rounded people. They are not a neutral filter. They are a spike-rejection filter. They will report back that the candidate seemed fine, and you will hire flatland, and you will not understand why.
Six months in, audit honestly. If the hire is not carrying the spike, the executive — you — made the mistake. Don't punish the person for failing in a misaligned role. Move them. Update the interview process so the next hire actually has the spike you needed.
Hiring spike is the easy part. The harder part is what happens to the spike six months later — when the org meets the person you successfully hired and decides they are too uncomfortable to keep around.
Not the only way. Probably not even the best way. Just one practitioner's version that worked.
~Discovering Turiya@work@life
