How to spot a bad attitude before hiring someone

A confident candidate and a bad-attitude candidate can look the same early in an interview, and the difference is whether they still expect to learn the specific company. Jason Harper, Founder at Ready Signal, screens out the one who arrives certain their way is the answer, and keeps the one who brings a real background and no assumption that it transfers untouched.

A new marketing hire has less time to prove out than the timeline they were handed suggests. Jason Harper's rule of thumb is that a marketer told they have six months should show worth in two to three, and keep the founder posted throughout. Etgar Shpivak tells founders to plan for roughly half the runway they promise.

Attitude-first hiring keeps competence on the list; it just lets a coachable hire close the skills gap on the job. The exception is when there is nobody to coach them, and Jason Harper points out that as an investor he cannot train a founder, so competence matters more on a check. Etgar Shpivak's rule is to name which of the three you can afford to teach before the interview.

Pay the first marketing hire enough to make the role a genuine bet; underpaying a senior one tends to backfire. Jason Harper once brought in a CMO friend at about a quarter of what the man felt he was worth, and the hire lasted roughly nine months before both agreed it was failing. Etgar Shpivak treats a senior marketing hire as an all-in commitment, and structuring the pay is its own decision.

The honest answer depends on whether the founder can already run the marketing themselves. Jason Harper has no interest in a fractional CMO for Ready Signal, because he came up through marketing agencies and fills that role part of the time himself; a founder without that background often needs someone in the seat. Decide it against when the first marketing hire is worth making.

Hiring for attitude means weighing three things in a fixed order: attitude, then effort, then competence. Jason Harper of Ready Signal hires this way because competence can be taught later, while attitude decides whether a person can be taught at all. In practice it means preferring a candidate open to learning over an experienced one whose mind is already made up.

Early on the role shifts fast, so how someone works matters more than how their portfolio reads. Thin experience with the right attitude is a smaller risk than it looks, because competence fills gaps quickly. A closed attitude, by contrast, doesn't move, and even the most experienced candidate fails if they aren't willing to learn.

Attitude is exactly the part of a hire you cannot coach in later. Competence can be filled in on the job, but if someone arrives already finished, certain they know everything, there is little you can do with that from the inside. So screen for attitude in the interview itself, before the offer, rather than hoping to change it afterward.

Watch the order a candidate presents themselves in. Someone who opens with what they already know and how many years they've done it, arriving with 'I've been doing this for years, do it my way,' is showing a closed attitude. Another signal is a candidate who trusts a fixed process over the company in front of them, asking for months to plan before shipping anything.

A consultant earns their place here by helping a founder define the attitude, effort, and competence the first hire actually needs, and by sitting in on the interviews. The attitude-first order works best when someone has screened for it before, which is judgment an outside pair of hands brings. Etgar Shpivak, a marketing consultant who works with seed and Series A founders, does exactly this, directly with the founder. More on how he works.

Harper runs the same three things, in the same order, when he sizes up a founder to back. The signal comes through in conversation: he once invested in an analytics company after the founder won him over, not the pitch deck. The difference is that an investor can't train the founder, so he weighs competence more heavily on a bet he can't fix from the inside.