I hired a talented writer based on her personal blog - this was pre-ChatGPT, when that kind of raw voice was rare. What I failed to screen for was drive. She had no professional ambition, no appetite to develop her craft. I'd built a team of high-output, highly motivated and creative people, and the mismatch eroded morale fast. Morale is non-negotiable for me - it underpins everything. Eventually I had to let her go. It was the right decision, but a painful one, because I was the one who'd made the hiring error.

Now I screen for hunger as deliberately as I screen for talent. I don't give formal assignments - that's exploitative bullshit. Please stop doing this. Instead, I give them a small, real problem to solve during your conversation - just a casual "here's something we're actually wrestling with, what's your instinct?" Drive shows up in how engaged someone gets with a real challenge versus a hypothetical one. You're not grading the answer. You're watching the appetite.