Hi friends - I hope you’ve been enjoying the content from our fantastic guest authors! I have two more lovely humans who will be sharing their wisdom with you during September and October and then you’ll be stuck with me again after that!

Our September author and teacher is Richard Washington, Founder of Tick Talent, a GTM talent agency. Rich is one of the best in the biz, taking a much more methodical and strategic approach to recruiting than I typically see. He also runs a very successful (and educational) podcast called What Makes You Tick - highly recommend you check it out!

Rich will be sharing some gems on GTM hiring - his specialty. He’s kicking things off by giving us a rundown on some really common hiring mistakes and tips on how to avoid them.

Let’s go!

The 5 GTM Hiring Mistakes That Quietly Drain Seed & Series A Runway

If you’ve ever lost sleep over a hire, you’re not alone.

Before you dive in, a quick note of gratitude to Jess Schultz for letting me take over her newsletter this month.

On her GTM Multivitamins podcast, Jess and I unpacked the “Seed-to-Series A Growth Playbook for Founders”, and a couple of these mistakes directly mirror what we talked about on the pod.

If you’d like the full conversation, you can check it out here -

Let’s get into this topic!

At Seed and Series A, you don’t have layers of leadership or endless runway. Every GTM hire is a high-stakes bet.

When it works, you feel the lift in every number. When it doesn’t, you feel it in every corner of the business, stalled deals, missed targets, your own time dragged back into firefighting.

Most founders I speak to aren’t making hiring mistakes because they don’t care or aren’t smart. They’re making them because the pace is fast, the pressure is real, and the gap in the team is costing them money every day.

Like Jess says about GTM, hiring isn’t easy, but it’s incredibly simple. The problem is we overcomplicate it.

There’s so much conflicting advice, and every person you ask will give you a different answer. But as a founder, you don’t have unlimited time or unlimited resources -so you have to be clear on what to do first.”

Here are five of the most common traps I see, and how you can think about them differently -

#1 Not Scoping the Role Properly

One of the fastest ways to waste time and money is to go to market with a generic job description. It attracts hundreds of candidates you don’t want, floods your pipeline, and forces you to spend hours trying to find the few good ones.

The deeper problem? You weren’t clear enough on exactly why you’re hiring in the first place.

That’s why we run every client through our Impact Scoping process before we lift a finger. It’s a series of 60 questions we ask key decision-makers inside the business to get total clarity on:

• Purpose: Why this role exists, why now, and the impact it needs to make.

• Importance: Where it fits into the growth story and strategy.  What it will mean for the business and some key people when this hire is in and delivering.

• Best-Case Scenario: What “amazing” looks like 6–12 months in.

• Success Criteria: The measurable outcomes that prove it worked (more on this later in the article).

Without this, you’re hiring off “nice to haves” and assumptions, not aligned outcomes. And that’s how you end up spending six figures on someone who was never set up to succeed. 

But get it right up front and you can move with incredible speed to find and secure exactly what you need for your growth stage and challenge.

#2 Hiring for Logos Over Grit

Picture this. You’ve been chasing product-market fit, you finally have some traction, and the next step is obvious: a proven GTM leader to scale it.

A candidate lands in your inbox with a CV full of big-name logos. You imagine the playbooks they’ll bring, the network, the polish. It feels like a safe bet.

But Sequoia estimates a bad executive hire costs 213% of their base salary. For a startup VP of Sales, that’s $500K+ gone. Jason Lemkin warns 70% of startup Sales VPs don’t last a year.

One founder I worked with had hired from a household-name SaaS giant. That leader had only ever run a machine, never built one. At the startup, they waited for a process that didn’t exist. By month six, they were gone, and so was half a million dollars in runway.

The issue here isn’t intelligence or competence - it’s misalignment. At bigger companies, processes are inherited. At your stage, they need to be created from scratch.

The fix: Before interviews, define the attitudes and behaviours your best people share. Then test for them. My favourite?

“You’ve joined today. There’s no pipeline. You have 48 hours. What’s your plan?”

Founder Self-Check:

• Have I defined the 3-5 behaviours my best people share?

• Do I have an interview question that tests for building from scratch?

You’re not just looking for answers. You’re looking for someone who thrives in ambiguity and builds from zero.

#3 Confusing Dividers with Multipliers

Sometimes a hire hits their numbers but leaves the rest of the team flat. Or worse, people get frustrated and hand in their notice.

A founder I know once hired a sales leader who looked like a dream on paper.  Great track record of companies worked for in the industry, strong execution through results they’d achieved, and even some early wins on the board.

But within months, the warning signs were obvious. They hoarded the best accounts, rewrote other people’s proposals, and shut down ideas unless they came from them.

On paper, they were a top performer. In reality, the team’s morale was tanking, collaboration had dried up, and good people were leaving.

When people aren’t aligned to the vision and mission, they focus on building power by building their own empires inside the business. This is the root of most silos, and left too long, it’s where politics kick in.

That’s a Divider in the Multiplier Matrix (we’ll go deep on this in article 4). 

Dividers may deliver individually, but they subtract from the team’s potential by creating silos that don’t serve the mission. Multipliers, on the other hand, lift the performance of everyone around them.

The CORE4 behaviours: Collaborative, Ownership, Resourcefulness, Execution… are your best early indicators. 

Some simple “tells”? 

• In interviews, notice: Do they say “we” or “I”?

• Can they share an example of helping a teammate win when there was nothing in it for them?

• Do they take credit for successes but pass the blame for failures?

• Are they truly aligned to your vision and mission, or is it more about what they can achieve personally?

At Seed/Series A, every hire should be a potential Multiplier for you. Anything less slows your growth, or risks damaging your culture.

#4 The Wrong Level (and the Responsibility-Accountability-Authority Trap)

Another common trap is hiring the wrong level of person, not senior enough to solve your problem, or too senior for what the role actually demands.

We see this when companies confuse Responsibility (doing the work), Accountability (keeping score and reporting on it), and Authority (making the decisions).

Too often, leaders are given responsibility and accountability without the authority to make decisions. It’s frustrating for them, it slows the business, and it turns your hire into a passenger instead of a driver.

The fix: Decide what blend of strategic vs. execution focus you really need. Then hire accordingly:

• If you need strategy and execution, hire a proven builder (often VP-level).

• If you only need execution, hire a strong manager or IC and give strategic oversight to someone else internally.

• If you need strategy but not execution, a fractional or advisory role might fit.

Misalign this, and you’ll either burn cash on a “name” who’s bored, or frustrate a capable operator who’s handcuffed.

To help clients through this thinking I’ve developed a tool to get clear on exactly what we expect from them, and which level they need this person to operate at.  e.g.

Suggested reading here: Scaling Up (How a Few Companies Make It…and Why the Rest Don’t) by Verne Harnish

#5 No Top 5 Criteria to Assess Against for their Capabilities

You’ve got multiple GTM roles to fill. The urgency is high. Interviews are happening. But there’s no clear, shared picture of what a great hire looks like and what they should bring to the business.

From a recent founder conversation: they were hiring SDRs, AEs, and AMs all at once. The urgency was real , but without a scoring system, decisions turned into weeks of debating bullet points and CV gaps instead of whether the person could 3× the pipeline in six months.

The fix: Pick the five competencies most predictive of success in your world. Build your assessment process around them. And set one rule: if a candidate doesn’t score at least 3/5 on all five, they don’t make the cut.

Example scorecard for an AE:

This isn’t about adding complexity and rigidity.  Done well the HOW will be up to them to show.  But you are not leaving the WHAT to chance.  A good assessment happens when we define what success looks like. And that clarity and alignment means you can move at speed.

As I thank you for reading this first article of our 4 part mini-series, here’s a final thought…

Sadly, hiring at Seed and Series A will never be totally risk-free. We’re dealing with people after all, and we are a complicated bunch! But you can make those bets with far more confidence if you’re clear on what you need, test for it, and measure it the same way every time.

The Multiplier Matrix is one different way, or lens to think about it through.  The goal is to fill your team with Multipliers, avoid Adders who just maintain, and actively coach up, or coach out the Dividers and Subtractors who hold the team back (or spot those behaviours during the hiring process to avoid the pain!)

If you want to dig deeper into how to spot and hire the right people for your culture, check out my conversation with Gabe Lullo and Lexi Graham from Alleyoop on their podcast “Do Hard Things”.

Want to learn more about how I help startups increase their revenue by 150-590%? 👀 

Know someone who could benefit from being added to this distribution? Send them here to sign up!

With love and gratitude,