The resume is a decorative variable. The interview is a decorative variable. The only structural question in any hire is: can this person produce the specific output you need, in the specific environment you have, starting now?
The standard hiring process evaluates roughly ten variables: education, years of experience, previous employers, interview performance, cultural fit, references, skills tests, personality assessments, salary expectations, and availability. Most companies treat these as equally important. They're not. Most of them don't predict performance at all.
Google's internal research (Project Oxygen, later expanded by Laszlo Bock's team) found that GPA and school prestige had zero correlation with job performance after two years. The U.S. Department of Labor has estimated that the average cost of a bad hire is 30% of the employee's first-year earnings. For a $150K executive hire, that's $45K in direct cost — not counting the opportunity cost of the seat being filled by the wrong person while the right person is available.
The problem isn't that hiring is hard. It's that most hiring processes are optimized for the wrong variable.
Credentials are a proxy for competence — not competence itself. A Harvard MBA tells you someone passed a rigorous admissions process and completed a structured program. It does not tell you whether they can build a financial model under time pressure in your specific industry with your specific data limitations. The credential is a filter for the applicant pool. It is not evidence of output in your environment. Treating it as such is how companies hire impressive resumes and get mediocre results.
Interviews measure interview skill. They do not measure job performance. A large-scale meta-analysis by Schmidt and Hunter (1998) found that unstructured interviews — the kind most companies rely on — have a predictive validity of just 0.38 for job performance. For context, a coin flip is 0.50. The candidate who "felt right" in the room is the candidate who is good at interviews. That's a separate skill from the one you're hiring for.
"Culture fit" is the most expensive decorative variable in hiring. It sounds structural — you want someone who aligns with how your team works. But in practice, "culture fit" almost always means "someone I'm comfortable with" — which biases toward homogeneity, penalizes unconventional thinkers, and filters out the people most likely to produce non-obvious results. The question isn't "do they fit the culture?" It's "can they produce the output?" If the answer is yes and the culture can't accommodate them, the problem is the culture, not the candidate.
Decorative approach: Review LinkedIn. Check titles. Look for brand-name companies. Interview for strategic vision. Check references. Evaluate cultural alignment.
CT10 approach: Define the single output this role must produce in the next 12 months. For a VP of Sales: $X in new revenue. For a COO: reduce operational cost by Y% while maintaining quality. For a CFO: close a specific financing round. Then ask every candidate one question: show me evidence that you have produced this specific output, at this scale, in a comparable environment.
Evidence means numbers, not narratives. "I led a high-performing sales team" is a narrative. "I took a team from $8M to $22M ARR in 18 months in a B2B SaaS environment with a 6-month sales cycle" is evidence. The first tells you they can talk about sales. The second tells you they can produce the output you need.
Decorative approach: Review portfolio. Assess aesthetic taste. Discuss creative philosophy. Check if they're "collaborative."
CT10 approach: The output for a creative hire is work that produces a measurable business result — conversions, engagement, brand perception shift, revenue. The portfolio shows taste. It doesn't show whether that taste translates to business outcomes in your context. Give them a paid trial project. Define the output in advance. Measure it.
This is uncomfortable because it feels transactional. It's not. It's honest. A 72-hour paid trial tells you more about future performance than ten hours of interviews — and it respects the candidate's time by compensating them for real work instead of asking them to perform in an artificial setting.
Decorative approach: Look for someone who's "done it before" at a similar company. Prioritize pattern matching: same industry, same stage, same company size.
CT10 approach: Operators are environmental. The same person who thrives in a structured 500-person company may fail in a chaotic 15-person startup — and vice versa. The output question for an operator isn't "have you done this job before?" It's "have you produced results in an environment with the same constraints as ours?" Constraints include: team size, budget, decision-making speed, ambiguity tolerance, and resource availability. A perfect resume from the wrong environment is a bad hire.
The most common operator hiring mistake: hiring someone from a company that was ten years ahead of yours and expecting them to recreate that infrastructure with a fraction of the resources. They're not bad at their job. They're in the wrong environment. CT10 says: match the environment, not the title.
Decorative approach: Hire the smooth talker. The person who "sells you in the interview." The one with the biggest Rolodex.
CT10 approach: Sales performance is the most measurable output in any company. The single variable: what was their quota attainment, as a percentage, in their last role — and was their sales environment comparable to yours? 150% quota attainment in a territory with inbound leads and an established brand is a different data point than 110% quota attainment in a greenfield territory with no brand recognition and no inbound pipeline. The second person is likely a better hire for an early-stage company, despite the lower number.
Ask for the number. If they can't give it to you — or won't — that's the answer.