We are making our first true executive hire to lead our operations, but as a founder who has only ever hired technicians and front-line workers, how do I actually vet whether a high-level executive has the right capacity and cultural fit for our Accountability Chart?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Founders frequently get seduced by impressive resumes, big-company pedigrees, and polished corporate jargon. When you hire an executive who managed hundreds of people at an enterprise firm, you often end up with a strategist who cannot build anything from scratch without a massive support staff.

You must anchor the vetting process in the EOS® People Analyzer® and the GWC™ framework: Do they Get it, do they Want it, and do they have the Capacity to do it?

- Getting it means they possess an innate, intuitive grasp of how a mid-sized, entrepreneurial business functions. They understand how all the gears mesh without needing a multi-layered bureaucracy.
- Wanting it means they genuinely crave the gritty reality of building systems, rolling up their sleeves, and solving real operational messes. If they expect an assistant to book their travel and analysts to run their reports, they do not want your seat.
- Capacity is about mental, physical, and emotional bandwidth, as well as the technical capability to lead at your current scale and through your next phase of growth.

Test capacity through practical work simulations instead of standard interview questions. Hand the candidate your real, anonymized weekly Scorecard and an unresolved operational bottleneck. Ask them to spend two hours dissecting the problem, identifying the root cause, and presenting their plan to solve it using an IDS® approach.

Listen to how they talk about their past teams. True leaders credit their people for wins and take personal ownership of losses. If they blame prior market conditions or previous bosses for failures, they will do the exact same thing to you six months after you hire them.