Asking candidates why they couldn't fix past frustrations reveals their operating limits
Nilan Peiris · Nilan Peiris: What Growth Hacks Worked and What Did Not, from Wise CPO | E1182 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Jul 26, 2024 · at 46:06
Nilan Peiris, Chief Product Officer at Wise, outlines his framework for interviewing talent and evaluating how candidates handle organizational friction.
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“So I try to get this out of them, and the way I get that usually is by saying, talk, talk me through what really frustrates you about where you are, and then you kind of get into, why does that really frustrate you, and then it'll always come down to the same things, like, my boss isn't behaving rationally, right, and they aren't optimizing for revenue, they're optimizing for X, or they're being too short-term, or this, or there's some toxic X, Y, Z in there that I can't. And then the question is like, well, why, why couldn't you fix this? Right. So what was the hard barrier that hit you hit that meant, because if you're doing wise, you're going to find these types of things. You need to be able to work through them, right? So why, why couldn't you fix this? And in that you find two things. One is whether they're able to kind of self reflect and say, actually, I understand why the CEO or the founder was behaving that way. And if I was in that role, I would have done that, and that's usually a big tick, or sometimes they're like, no, I don't get it, but ultimately through this conversation, they're really talking about their limit, because they hit their limit somewhere, and you can kind of then evaluate, will they run into that every day, every week, every month, or every year at WISE, and therefore would it work?”
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