Entrepreneur Marc Lore reveals that hiring “rock stars” is impossible through interviews alone, arguing that founders must instead decode resume patterns and embrace high-stakes risks to prevent startup failure.
Decoding the “Superstar” Resume
It’s impossible. I’ve hired thousands of people. You cannot tell if somebody is a rock star in a one-hour interview, and more times than not, you’ll get honey potted. Somebody talks a good game, they sound good, they say the right things, they’ve got the right experience, then they don’t work out, and you wonder why.
I started going back to the resumes and trying to draw correlations, and what I found is there’s a clear pattern that superstars have in resumes that’s differentiated from a non-superstar. That doesn’t mean that somebody who doesn’t have a superstar resume couldn’t be a superstar. I miss out on those people, it’s fine. But when I see somebody who has a superstar resume, they’re almost always a superstar. When I interview them, I already know I want to hire them, and it’s more just to make sure that there’s nothing I’m missing from a behavioral standpoint or culture or values — we want alignment there.
The Anatomy of Consistent Success
But the resume has to show a demonstrable level of success in every job that they were in. That means multiple promotions. It means staying at a company long enough to get promoted, and it means when you leave and go from one company to another, it’s a big move. Superstars don’t move laterally. They don’t move down from a good company to a bad company, because bad companies need to pay more to attract people and so sometimes they shake loose people that aren’t as good, that just want to go for the money.
But you find somebody that’s [in the top] 5% and you look at their resume, it’s like: boom, boom, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, promotion, and then a big jump … promotion, promotion, big jump. When I get that resume that shows that demonstrable level of success, I grab it and I pay them whatever they need. It’s that important to me to get that superstar in there. And you build a company of superstars.
You have to have the right performance management system so that they know exactly what they need to do to get to the next level. Because the superstars are highly motivated. They want to know what they need to do to get to the next level, especially Gen Z. They want to know and get promoted every six months.
Why the Status Quo is a Death Sentence
People always underestimate the risk of the status quo, and they overestimate the risk of making a change. I see that over and over and over.
If you have a life-threatening medical condition, and the doctor’s like, “You have six months to live,” at that point, a trial drug or anything, even if it’s super risky, [is going to look good]. You’re basically seeking opportunities to take risk, to not have that inevitable death.
If you’re super healthy and everything’s going great, and somebody says, “Take this experimental drug; it might make you live longer,” [a lot of people will say], “You know what? It’s too risky. I’m really healthy. I don’t want to die from this drug.”
But startups are very different than big companies. When you’re at a big company like Walmart [whose U.S. e-commerce business Lore ran after selling it one of his companies], it’s all about incremental improvement. There’s no incentive to take risk.
As a startup founder, chances are you’re going to die. Chances are you are going to die every day that you’re living and doing this startup. The probability is 80%, with only a 20% chance of this actually working. So you have to take that into account when you’re making decisions. You have to seek opportunities to take risk, to reduce your risk of dying. The status quo is the worst thing you can do. Doing nothing is the most risk you can possibly take.
