A few years ago I ran a masterclass for the full hiring-management layer of a fast-growing software company: every VP, director and team lead who was allowed to say "yes" to a candidate. The brief was simple and terrifying at the same time — in a scale-up, every hire is either a step toward the plan or two steps back from it, plus the money and the runway lost while you go and do it again.

That session turned into a framework I've used and refined ever since. Part of it borrows from B2B sales qualification methodology (the discipline of MEDDPICC-style thinking: don't move forward until you can actually evidence the thing you believe), and part of it borrows from Behavioral/Performance-Based Interviewing, a technique long used in high-stakes selection. 

What follows is that framework, cleaned up, anonymized, and written down properly for the first time.

Why "gut feel" and "CV-only" fails

Most hiring conversations are still won or lost on a CV and forty-five minutes of unstructured chat. It feels efficient. It isn't predictive.

The most cited body of evidence here is Frank Schmidt and John Hunter's meta-analysis of personnel-selection methods, later revisited by Sackett and colleagues. The consistent finding across decades of research: unstructured interviews — the "tell me about yourself" style most of us still run — correlate with future job performance. 

Structured interviews, built around consistent criteria and behavioral evidence, come in meaningfully higher, with some re-analyses placing them as the single best predictor of performance available to a hiring manager, ahead of years of experience or education. Years of experience alone barely moves the needle.

In other words: the two things most interview processes lean on hardest — the CV and the unscripted chat — are close to the bottom of the list of things that actually predict whether someone will succeed in the role. That gap is where this framework lives.

Where the framework comes from

I didn't invent this from a whiteboard. I built it the way you build most useful things in hiring: by making a lot of hiring decisions, watching which ones held up eighteen months later, and working backward from the pattern. Over the years I picked out the parts that resonated, tested them repeatedly across go-to-market hiring — the roles where a mis-hire is most expensive because they touch revenue directly — and kept what people consistently responded well to.

The result is five criteria for reading a candidate, deliberately presented in no fixed order, plus a technique for interviewing that actually produces evidence instead of stories.

Here's the part people usually miss: these five criteria don't sit on the same axis of "changeable vs fixed," and knowing where each one sits tells you where you, as a manager, can actually have impact after the hire is made.

Some traits are essentially static — stable, slow to shift, closer to identity than to skill (character sits here). Others are laborious — they can change, but only with real, sustained effort (deep experience gaps fall here). Some are time-sensitive, shifting naturally as circumstances and seniority change. Some respond well to a reflective approach — coaching someone by repeating their own statements back to them, letting them arrive at their own insight rather than being told. And some are genuinely imminent — able to shift almost immediately, given the right moment and the right nudge (attitude, again, is the standout here).

The practical takeaway: don't spend your coaching energy trying to move something static. Spend it where the criterion is imminent or reflective — that's where a manager's input compounds fastest.

The other half: Behavioural/Performance-Based Interviewing

Knowing what to look for is only half the job. The other half is asking questions that actually surface evidence instead of a rehearsed narrative.

Definition: Behavioral/Performance-Based Interviewing (BPI) is a technique that focuses on a candidate's actual past experiences, behaviors, knowledge, skills and abilities — asking for specific, real examples of when they demonstrated a behavior, as a way of predicting how they'll behave and perform in the future.

The caveat that matters: circumstances are often a bigger factor in someone's success than their behavior as a fixed trait. A different manager, a different team, a different culture, different resources — all of it can produce a very different outcome from the same person. Money talks, everything else is noise. Be aware of the environment a success story happened in, not just the story itself.

Bringing it all together

None of this replaces judgment — it just structures it. The five criteria give you a consistent lens instead of five different interviewers each grading on whatever they personally value. The manageability framing tells you where to invest your energy once someone's hired. And behavioral/performance-based interviewing gives you a way to actually test for all five with evidence, not vibes.

A mis-hire in a growth business doesn't just cost the salary and recruitment fee. It costs the deals that didn't get worked, the ramp-up time wasted, time reinvest in whoever replaces the individual, and the morale punch to the team that carried the gap and possible (financial) target. If a slightly more structured, slightly more deliberate interview process shaves even a small percentage off your mis-hire rate, the math works out fast.

I'd genuinely be interested to hear how other hiring leaders weigh these five criteria, and whether the order changes by function. That's exactly the kind of debate the original masterclass audience had — and it's usually where the best insight shows up.