Hiring for Slope, Not Level

I interview a lot of people. It's one of the most important things I do. And for most of my career, I thought I was pretty good at reading resumes, matching experience to job descriptions, checking boxes, looking for the 'right fit.'

Then I read three books in a row that rewired how I think about every single hire.

Adam Grant's "Hidden Potential." Patty McCord's "Powerful." Daniel Coyle's "The Talent Code."

Each one on its own is powerful. Together, they form something I didn't expect: a unified theory of how to find people who will actually grow with your company, not just fill a seat.

The Resume Trap

Here's the uncomfortable truth that Adam Grant drops early in Hidden Potential: a meta-analysis of 44 studies covering 11,000 people found that past performance barely predicts future performance.

Let that sink in. The thing we spend the most time evaluating in hiring, what someone has already done, is one of the weakest predictors of what they'll do next.

Grant's alternative is elegant: measure slope, not level. Don't ask where someone is today. Ask how far they've climbed and how fast they're climbing. A candidate who went from a frontline retail role to managing a region in three years has a steeper slope than someone who has been comfortably sitting in a senior title for a decade.

I've started asking myself a different question in every interview: 'What's this person's trajectory?' Not their title. Not their company name. Their arc.

Talent Isn't Born. It's Built.

Daniel Coyle spent years studying "talent hotbeds", tiny, often under-resourced places that produce world-class performers at impossible rates. A single Russian tennis club with one indoor court that produced more top-20 women's players than the entire United States. The Dominican Republic producing MLB players at a rate that defies its population. Brazilian futsal courts turning out soccer legends.

His finding was neurological: talent is myelin. It's the insulation that wraps around nerve fibers when you practice at the edge of your ability, make mistakes, and correct them. More wraps, faster signals, better performance. Talent isn't a gift you're born with. It's a biological construction you build through struggle.

This changes everything about how you evaluate candidates. The person who had a smooth, easy career path? They might be talented. But the person who fought through adversity, figured things out in unfamiliar territory, made mistakes and kept correcting? They've been building myelin. They've been growing talent in real time.

Coyle also found something I keep coming back to: in a study of 157 children learning music, the single strongest predictor of progress wasn't IQ, natural rhythm, or family income. It was commitment level — measured before lessons even began. The kids who said 'I'm going to do this long-term' outperformed everyone else, regardless of starting ability.

Commitment over credentials. Every time.

The Environment Is the Multiplier

Patty McCord built Netflix's culture during its most transformative years. Her book, Powerful, is blunt in a way that HR people rarely are. Her most provocative idea: when someone isn't performing, the real problem is usually the hire, not the individual.

But McCord's deeper insight is about environment. She argues for radical honesty, continuous, real-time feedback delivered like a sports coach, not like a bureaucratic annual review. She argues for treating people like adults, trusting them with information, autonomy, and responsibility.

Grant adds the concept of scaffolding: temporary support structures designed to help someone through a specific challenge, then come down when they're ready to stand on their own. Scaffolding is not a crutch. A crutch becomes permanent. Scaffolding is designed to be removed.

And Coyle describes what he calls 'master coaching', not motivational speeches or pep talks, but quiet, precise, targeted adjustments. The best coaches he studied listened more than they talked. They observed deeply before offering specific corrections. They made themselves progressively unnecessary.

The pattern across all three books is clear: you can hire the most promising person in the world, but if you drop them into an environment without honest feedback, without scaffolding, without coaching, they'll plateau. Environment is the multiplier that turns potential into performance.

What I Do Differently Now

1. I read trajectories, not titles.

When I look at a resume, I'm tracking the slope. How quickly did they take on more responsibility? Did they move laterally to learn new things? Did they ever take a step back to grow in a different direction? The story of movement matters more than the destination.

2. I ask about struggle.

Not 'tell me about your greatest achievement.' Tell me about a time you were completely in over your head. What did you do? How did it change you? That's where the growth happened. That's the myelin. If someone has never been uncomfortable, they haven't been building.

3. I test for commitment, not just competence.

I want to know what someone cares about deeply enough to push through the hard parts. Not passion in the motivational-poster sense — commitment in the Coyle sense. The quiet, determined decision to keep going when it gets difficult. That predicts growth better than any skills assessment.

4. I think about the environment I'm hiring into.

Am I setting this person up with honest feedback loops? Do they have a coach, not just a manager? Is there scaffolding for their first 90 days that's designed to come down? If I can't answer yes to all three, the problem isn't the hire. It's me.

The New Model

The old hiring model is a level check: 'Is this person good enough right now?'

The new model is a slope check: 'Is this person climbing fast enough to grow with us?'

It's a harder question to answer. It requires you to look past polished resumes and rehearsed interview answers. It requires you to value struggle over smoothness, commitment over credentials, trajectory over titles.

But when you get it right, when you find someone on a steep slope and give them the environment to keep climbing, you don't just fill a role. You unlock something. Grant calls it hidden potential. Coyle calls it the talent code. McCord would probably just call it good hiring.

I call it the way forward.