What I Actually Look For When Hiring GTM Staff
A hiring scorecard has many dimensions. It's easy to get lost in them. At the end of the day, three things consistently make the difference across every GTM role I've ever hired for. These are the must-haves.
In short
Across every GTM role, three things make the difference: an achiever pattern, a growth mindset and coachability.
None of them appear on a CV. They need an interview process that creates the conditions to observe behaviour, not just collect answers. Hire for the capacity to grow.
“Hire for the capacity to grow.”
A thorough hiring process generates a lot of signal. Structured scorecards, competency frameworks, technical assessments, culture interviews, all of it valuable, all of it necessary. And yet, after working through enough of them, I've found that it's easy to get lost in the dimensions and lose sight of the few that truly determine whether a hire will compound over time.
Every GTM role has its own requirements. The profile for an AE looks different from a BDR lead, which looks different from a head of sales. That variation is real and should be respected.
But underneath all of it, three dimensions show up as must-haves across every role, every level, every stage. When these are present, almost everything else can be developed. When they're absent, no amount of experience or polish compensates for long.
(01) Criterion 01: The Achiever Pattern
This is not about whether someone has impressive numbers on their résumé. Numbers can be inherited, from a hot market, a strong brand, inbound volume that would have converted regardless of who was on the phone. Numbers are context-dependent in ways that CVs never reflect.
What I'm looking for is a pattern of deliberate achievement. Evidence that this person has set difficult targets for themselves, not just hit the ones that were set for them, and has shown up for those targets with consistency over time.
The achiever pattern isn't about the result. It's about the relationship with difficulty.
In practice, it shows up across domains. A candidate who was a competitive athlete and also rebuilt a broken territory from scratch is showing you something. Not that sport predicts sales success, but that this person has a practiced relationship with hard work, setback, and disciplined recovery. The pattern compounds across contexts.
The tell in interviews: achievers talk about what they specifically did, not what the team did. They can name the inflection point, the moment something changed and why. They have a view on what they would have done differently. Performers who were along for the ride cannot reconstruct the mechanism. They describe results. Achievers describe the decisions that produced them.
Looks like: Specific, reconstructable stories · Owns both success and failure · Sets self-imposed standards · Pattern visible across multiple domains
Watch for: Credits luck or market conditions · "We" without a clear personal contribution · Only performs when externally motivated · Can't describe the mechanism, only the result
(02) Criterion 02: Growth Mindset
The term has been used so often it has lost almost all meaning. So I'll be specific about what I'm actually looking for, because it isn't a personality type, and it doesn't show up in how someone describes themselves.
A genuine growth mindset is visible in how someone relates to the edges of their competence. Do they know where their limits are? Do they move toward them or away from them? When they've been wrong about something important, what happened next?
The candidates who worry me are not the ones who lack confidence. They're the ones who have never seriously updated a belief about themselves. That rigidity is invisible in a strong market. It becomes a liability the moment conditions change.
In GTM specifically, the environment shifts constantly, new buyers, new categories, new competitive dynamics, new tooling. A rep who was excellent three years ago in a different motion is not automatically excellent today. The ones who stay excellent are the ones who treat every shift as information, not threat.
This is also where I look for intellectual curiosity that extends beyond the job. A candidate who reads widely, who is genuinely interested in how things work, who brings up something they recently changed their mind about, these are imperfect but meaningful signals. Not because curiosity is inherently valuable in sales. But because it correlates with the willingness to be wrong, which is the precondition for getting better.
Looks like: Named, specific belief updates · Comfortable not knowing something · Curious about the interviewer's view · Tracks their own development deliberately
Watch for: No meaningful answer to "what changed your mind" · Frames growth in purely external terms · Defensive when limits are probed · Learning is performative, not operational
(03) Criterion 03: Coachability
This is the criterion most interviewers think they're assessing and almost none actually are. Coachability sounds like receptiveness, a disposition toward feedback. It isn't. Disposition is easy to perform in an interview. Coachability is a behavior, and it only shows up under conditions that an interview rarely creates.
What coachability actually means: when someone receives a specific, pointed piece of feedback that challenges something they're doing, they engage with it rather than deflect from it. They ask questions. They test it. They come back with a view on whether it was right, not just a thank-you.
The distinction I care about is between compliance and integration. A compliant rep nods, adjusts in the moment, and reverts to the prior behavior when no one is watching. A coachable rep takes feedback into their own model of how they work and changes the model. One is performance. The other is development.
Coachability is not humility. Some of the most coachable people I've hired have pushed back hard on feedback before accepting it. That's not resistance, that's thinking. What matters is what happens after the pushback.
There is also a version of coachability that is about pace. Some people can receive feedback and implement it within a session. Others need time to process before the feedback becomes behavior. Both can be coachable. What I'm watching for is whether the loop closes at all, whether feedback eventually produces change, in any timeframe.
The single best way to assess this in an interview: give the candidate live feedback on something they've said or done in the room, and watch what happens. Not harsh feedback. Specific, actionable feedback. The response, whether defensive, curious, deflecting or engaged, tells you more than any answer to any question will.
Looks like: Engages with live feedback in the room · Can name a specific behavior that changed · Pushes back thoughtfully, then integrates · Feedback loop closes, eventually
Watch for: Deflects or generalises when probed · "I'm always open to feedback" with no examples · Compliant in the room, no evidence of change · Feedback loop never closes
(04) (closing)
None of these three criteria appear on a CV. None of them can be reliably inferred from a LinkedIn profile or a reference who liked working with the person. They require a deliberate interview process, one that creates the conditions to observe behavior, not just collect answers.
A scorecard can hold twenty dimensions. Most of them matter in context. But when I'm trying to cut through the noise of a process and make a call, these three are what I come back to. They're the dimensions that compound, or don't, regardless of what else is true about the candidate.
Hire for the capacity to grow. Everything else can be taught.