Filter out the tourists. A startup hiring rubric.

Most candidates we screen are tourists. They've heard startup is the cool place to work, they've read the Twitter threads, they've watched a few All-In episodes. They want the wardrobe. They don't want the work.

The job of a recruiting process is to filter them out before they cost you 90 days of onboarding and a quarter of team velocity. Here's the rubric we run every search through.

Three questions that do most of the work

1. What did you build at your last company that wasn't your job?

Tourists list responsibilities. Operators list things they shipped that nobody asked them to. If the answer is a feature, a process, an internal tool, or a hire — keep going. If the answer is hedged or vague, you're talking to a tourist.

2. Walk me through the last time you owned a decision that turned out to be wrong.

Operators have a quick answer to this and don't get defensive. Tourists either can't think of one or recast a small mistake as a learning experience. We're not looking for self-flagellation — we're looking for someone who runs toward ownership instead of away from it.

3. What's a problem at our company you'd want to work on in your first 60 days?

This separates people who looked at your website for ten minutes from people who actually thought about your business. The bar is low — they don't have to be right, they just have to have a take. Tourists give you a non-answer. Operators give you something specific enough to argue with.

What the tourist signals look like in practice

• —Asks about WFH policy before asking about the product
• —Wants the comp range before wanting the scope of the role
• —Has been at four companies in five years, each for 12 months
• —Talks about 'work-life balance' as a primary criterion
• —Lists hobbies in the first 10 minutes
• —Asks zero questions about the team they'd work with

None of these are dealbreakers individually. Three or more is a tourist. Five is someone who's going to leave in nine months for somewhere with better snacks.

What the operator signals look like

• —Asks who the hardest customer is and why
• —Asks where the bottleneck currently sits
• —Has read at least one piece of public writing from the team
• —Wants to know what the first 30 days look like specifically
• —Asks what success looks like and how it'll be measured
• —Doesn't try to hide a previous role they didn't enjoy

The hard part

Tourists are charming. They've practiced. They know what startup founders want to hear because the playbook is on every podcast. The rubric works because it gets past the practiced answer and into how someone actually thinks.

Run the rubric. Cut the tourists. Hire the operators.