Hiring for potential is something most engineering leaders say they do. It shows up in job postings (“we invest in your growth”), in interview scorecards (“learning agility”), in the language leaders use when describing their teams. What gets said less often is what it actually costs when you bet on potential and the timeline doesn’t go the way you expected.
Around 2017 or 2018, when I was leading a team at Capital One, I had a hire I was genuinely excited about. He came out of a smaller company, didn’t have experience with the scale of systems we were building, and hadn’t worked in financial services before — but in the interview process he’d shown something I found hard to ignore: a quality of reasoning that was unusually good for someone at his level. He asked questions I didn’t expect, he thought about tradeoffs in ways that were more sophisticated than his resume suggested, and I had a strong gut feeling that he would grow quickly into a genuinely strong engineer.
He did — eventually. But “eventually” stretched longer than I’d planned for, and the team felt that stretch.
The gap wasn’t obvious at first. He was earnest, he worked hard, and he was clearly trying. But there were contributions I’d expected him to be making by month four or five that weren’t happening yet — not because he wasn’t capable, but because he needed more time and more context than I’d budgeted for. The team picked up the slack, largely without complaint, but I could feel the weight being redistributed. And there was a period where I honestly wasn’t sure whether my read of him had been right or whether I’d made a mistake I was going to have to live with.
He got there. By the end of his first year he was doing exactly what I’d hoped, and by year two he was one of the stronger engineers on the team. The bet paid off. But the cost was real: the team carried more for longer than was fair to them, and I should have been more honest with myself — and with them — about what I was asking of them when I made that hire.
The lesson I took from that experience wasn’t “don’t hire for potential.” It was: be honest with yourself about the actual ramp timeline, the actual cost of that ramp to the people around the hire, and whether you have the capacity to absorb that cost without damaging your team’s ability to deliver.
There are situations where hiring for potential is clearly the right call. If you’re building a function from scratch, if you have a strong surrounding team with enough capacity to mentor, if you have enough runway before the role needs to be fully producing — in these contexts, betting on a high-ceiling candidate with a longer ramp is often better than hiring someone who can do the job today but won’t grow much beyond it.
There are situations where it isn’t. If you have an urgent gap in a specific capability and your team is already stretched, hiring someone who needs eight months to ramp into that capability isn’t serving the team — it’s serving the idea of the team you want to have, while the team you actually have suffers.
In terms of signals, the thing I’ve learned to look for when assessing potential versus current capability: how someone explains the things they’ve gotten wrong. Capable candidates explain their failures accurately. High-potential candidates explain their failures in ways that reveal how they’ll approach the next problem — they’ve metabolised the experience into something that changes how they work. That’s the specific quality that predicts growth, in my experience, more reliably than any credential or technical bar.
The other signal I watch for is how they engage with ambiguity in the interview itself. Not hypothetical ambiguity — the kind that shows up when you give a problem that doesn’t have a clean answer and see whether they push to resolve the ambiguity artificially or sit with it long enough to reason carefully. That quality of comfort with open-ended situations is the thing you’re really hiring when you hire for potential.
Both kinds of hires are right sometimes. The mistake is making a potential hire when you need a capability hire, or vice versa, and not knowing which one you’re making.