Stauch: Hiring merely 'good enough' candidates rapidly degrades company talent
Jake Stauch · Go hard early: How lessons from Verkada shaped this AI-native IT platform | Jake Stauch (Serval) · Oct 23, 2025 · at 1:08:02
Jake Stauch, founder and CEO of Serval, explains why interview panels must explicitly identify whether candidates raise the talent bar versus just passing standard screens.
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“When we're looking at candidates that we're bringing in, I like to make people tell me on the interview panel, who are they better than at the company? Because I think what often happens at your company. What often happens is coming to scale is you bring in people that are good enough that are maybe, you know, better than some of the people at the company. They pass the bar, they pass the screen and they get a thumbs up and they join, but they're actually at the 40th percentile to the 25th percentile of the people in the company. Or sometimes early stage, you bring in somebody who is definitively the worst person in the company, but they're good. And I think if you just make a habit of that, all of a sudden you just bring the talent bar of your company down so quickly without you even realizing it because they passed the bar.”
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