Next time you hire, look for distance traveled

And know what differentiating qualities you care about.

Hiring managers and recruiters often have subtle things they look for when interviewing. A CTO I spoke with told me he wants to hear about a candidate’s side projects. A COO mentioned he looks for entrepreneurship. These are what I’ll call differentiating qualities, the little tiebreaker details used to choose between equally qualified candidates.

What makes differentiating qualities interesting is that they’re not always agreed upon. One CTO might see side projects as someone who is not dedicated enough to their full-time role, while another will see curiosity and love of their craft.

The counterpart to differentiating qualities are more universal biases we have towards education (that Harvard grad must be smart) and experience (they worked at X well-known unicorn).

Assuming a decent competency-based assessment, most bad hires happen because we go away from differentiating qualities and lean too heavily on more basic biases.

Case in hand, I once made a hiring decision that went against the differentiating qualities I usually look for because I was impressed with the candidate’s resume. Their resume included a number of brands I respected and I figured that experience outweighed the subtle lack of self-awareness or accountability they’d displayed when pressed on examples of past failures. This person lasted a couple months in the role.

This got me thinking about my one-differentiating-quality-to-rule-them-all. The one that trumps all the rest. For me, it’s “distance traveled”.

Distance traveled was first coined by Freada Kapor Klein who used it as a metric to determine which entrepreneurs to fund. The idea was to measure someone’s achievements by considering their initial circumstances; a student who took 5 out of 27 offered AP exams is assessed differently from one who took 5 out of 5 available.

About two years ago, I was hiring a Director of Demand Generation. I was lucky enough to interview about ten highly qualified candidates who all seemed capable of doing the job. It was one of the more difficult hiring decisions I’ve had to make.

Having learned from past mistakes, I was leaning heavily on my differentiating qualities and it became clear to me that one of the candidates ticked all the boxes.

She was able to talk at length about moving countries, struggling to adapt to a new work culture, taking a step back in her career, and sum it all up with lessons learned and how she applied them to become a successful operator in a short-period of time.

Her answer exemplified a lot of differentiating qualities I hold dear: grit, resilience, self-awareness, adaptability. Any challenges she faced in this role would pale in comparison to the challenges she’d already faced.

In other words, the distance she’d traveled made me supremely confident in her. To this day, she’s one of the best hires I’ve made.

Here’s how to assess distance traveled

One of the benefits of considering 'distance traveled' is that it encompasses a range of qualities. That said, it’s not meant to romanticize hardship or to get you carried away with underdog stories. It’s not a replacement for a structured interview process, competency assessments, and involving different team members.

If you’re serious about using distance traveled as part of your hiring practice, create some structure around how you assess it. Ask questions like:

• "What’s the most significant challenge you’ve overcome in your personal or professional life?"

• "Can you tell us about your journey from where you started to where you are now?"

• "What have been some key lessons you’ve learned from the challenges you’ve faced?"

Note the type of adversity faced, the steps taken to overcome it, and the tangible outcomes achieved.

It’s important to remember that distance traveled will be different for each candidate. You’re also not looking for people to share personal stories or anything that may cause them discomfort.

You’re assessing the bigger swings people have taken and how those decisions shaped them. The experiences that pushed candidates out of their comfort zone and changed their perception of themselves and the world. Maybe it was foregoing a cushy graduate consulting job to join a startup out of university, or taking a year out to volunteer.

The thread in all great people I’ve worked with is that they have experience overcoming obstacles and fighting through difficult times.

Not only will you likely increase diversity of experiences and backgrounds (which is crucial to a thriving organisation), you’ll also build a team of people who will keep going when the going gets tough.