Why I stopped hiring for 'passion' and started hiring for this instead

Early hires at my second company were selected heavily on enthusiasm — people who said they loved the mission, who seemed genuinely excited in the interview. Nearly half of that first cohort burned out or left within a year, and it took me too long to notice the pattern connecting them.

What replaced "passion" as my main hiring signal was a much less exciting question: what's a boring, unglamorous task you've stuck with consistently for over a year, unrelated to any passion project. The answers ranged from maintaining a personal budget spreadsheet to a weekly call with an aging relative, and none of them had anything to do with the job. That wasn't the point.

The correlation I noticed, informally but consistently across two companies now, was between demonstrated follow-through on something boring and actual performance during a startup's inevitable unglamorous stretches — the months of unsexy debugging, unsexy customer support, unsexy paperwork that every company has regardless of its mission.

Passion predicted how someone talked about week one. Demonstrated boring consistency predicted how someone behaved in month nine, which turned out to be the month that actually mattered for whether they stayed.