Last month, I was helping one of my clients hire their first account executive.
A tech startup, early stage, not much cash to spend.
Two people made it to the final round.
One came from Google and studied at Bocconi. The kind of profile that makes you feel safe when you are so early.
The other was an underdog. No famous logos.
But she had been playing competitive sport since she was a kid, and she had spent years leading community projects on the side.
We hired her.
And today she is one of the best performers in the company.
During the phase of building my teams or working for clients, I have sometimes favoured top companies or universities.
But those profiles are expensive, and everyone (biased like me a few years ago) keeps hiring them.
And in an early-stage startup, you do not have the money.
You do not have the branding either.
Plus - those shiny profiles - very often do not work.
An early-stage startup is messy.
You need someone who is comfortable in the mess.
Someone who can read the room, work with limited information, learn on the go and still execute.
You need the candidate with "street smartness".
My friend Alessandro Verrini and I were talking about this over the weekend in Civitanova Marche, and we gave it a name: street smartness.
Street smartness is the set of skills life teaches you, not school.
The person who learned to figure things out on their own. To push through hard moments.
To read people and situations fast.
You can spot it in things like:
My new account executive had all of this.
Here is the simple rule I use.
Some skills you cannot teach.
Resiliency, business sense, grit, and the way someone treats a team.
People either built these in life, or they did not.
Other skills you can teach. CRM. Sales process. Product knowledge. The actual sales motion.
So hire for the unteachable.
Coach the teachable.
Write down the soft skills you cannot teach.
Make that your must-have list.
In interviews, ask about hard moments in their life, not just their job titles.
Ask behavioural questions like me, “tell me a moment when [this] happened and what did you do”.
Ask the candidate to run a STAR response (situation, task, action, result).
On the profile itself - look for sport, side projects, community work, anything that built grit.
Plan to teach the tools and the process yourself in the first 90 days with a structured onboarding process.
Because the polished CV looks good in a slide.
Street smartness wins all the time.
Thanks for reading this far. See you all next week!
