3 attributes to look for in early-stage employees

The top 5% of early-stage hires share three attributes. Here's how to find them.

I’ve hired and watched others hire hundreds of people at early-stage companies. Over time, a clear pattern emerged. The top 5% of those people (the ones who defined the company and moved the needle to an outsized degree) consistently shared three attributes: strong work ethic and stamina, the hunger and ability to learn new things, and a sharp EQ (emotional intelligence and empathy).

At the early stage, there’s no brand recognition to lean on, no established processes, and no one holding your hand. Things are changing all the time. You might be months away from running out of money. You’re literally living on the edge of whether the company survives.

You need people who can jump in and execute.

Hire the right ones, and they’ll carry you forward, setting the bar high for other employees. Hire the wrong ones, and they’ll stunt your growth.

I’m going to share why these three attributes matter specifically at the early stage of building a company, and how to screen for them before you make the hire.

Table of contents

1. A relentless work ethic and stamina

2. The hunger and ability to learn new things

3. A sharp EQ (emotional intelligence and empathy)

1. A relentless work ethic and stamina

You need your early employees to have the grit and stamina to do whatever it takes to get the job done. These are the people showing up to do the work when no one is watching, no one is asking, and nothing is easy. They should have the drive to outwork everyone around them.

My first company sold to very small business owners who would research vendors late at night after they finished their day, so there were plenty of incoming calls to be answered after hours. One of our reps would take his phone home at night and on weekends, plug it into his home network, and answer those calls. While everyone else was at dinner, he was closing deals.

He had more pipeline than anyone on the team and literally hit 3x his quota. He made the sacrifice and was willing to work after hours to help both the company and himself succeed. That’s grit.

One of the engineers at BetterCloud overhead me talking with someone on the team about a feature customers had been asking for – something that would help us close a big prospect. Without being asked, they spent the next two weeks working nights and weekends and delivered a fully built, ready-to-deploy version of something we’d been struggling to ship for months.

Another time, our customers were really pushing us for 24/7 support, but our entire team was on the East Coast. Instead of waiting for a solution, one of our support reps volunteered to flip his entire schedule. They started sleeping during the day and working overnight so we could test out extended coverage without hiring offshore.

A little crazy? Maybe. But that’s the kind of person who thrives at the early stage.

Brute force is often the only path forward when you’re getting started. There’s no marketing engine behind you, no inbound pipeline, and no support structure. You’re probably understaffed, meaning everyone is wearing multiple hats. But the people who succeed are the ones willing to grind through it anyway.

This is partly why (after years of backlash) hustle culture is making a comeback. The 9-9-6 model (9am to 9pm, six days a week) was being discussed in startup circles a lot earlier this year. Some companies even openly advertise it as their operating model.

I’m not here to glorify this, but at the early stage, outworking is how you get momentum. You need to punch above your weight to get from zero to 1.

How to screen for this

Ask this question: “What’s the hardest thing you’ve had to overcome in your personal or professional life?”

Then listen. Not just to what they say, but how they say it. The people who have been through genuinely hard things tend to have a resilience or a chip on their shoulder that’s hard to teach. You need people who are ready to go to battle for you.

The other move is to be upfront about the pace and reality of the job. Tell them what’s actually required. I’ve done this in interviews and watched people’s reactions tell me everything I needed to know. If they flinch, that’s useful information. You want someone who hears it and leans in.

2. The hunger and ability to learn new things

The second attribute is harder to fake: a genuine hunger to learn new things. Not just IQ or aptitude, but the actual desire to understand your industry, product, customers, and competitive landscape, even when none of it is inherently interesting.

The first company I ran sold phone systems to small businesses. Nothing too exciting there. But one of the best salespeople I ever hired made herself flashcards to memorize phone system terminology (PBX, VoIP, etc).

She studied those relentlessly, on her own, and without being asked. She would quiz herself on terms most people would never bother to learn. That way, even though this was her first job and she had no experience selling phone systems, she could speak with authority and answer questions accurately and confidently. That’s the mindset you’re looking for.

An engineer at another company spent a week sitting in the support queue, taking tickets as if they were on the support team. They wanted to understand firsthand what customers were experiencing and what it actually took to troubleshoot their problems. At the end of the week, they presented their findings to the entire engineering team.

I once challenged my entire sales team to do the actual work our customers were doing: log in to the product, go through the workflows, see what it felt like, and compare it to doing the same task manually without our product. One person did it. She came back having spent hours in a demo account, walking through real user workflows. She learned a ton about how people actually use the product and then integrated those insights into her conversations with prospects.

At one company, we were small and taking on a much bigger competitor. We were struggling to figure out how to position ourselves head-to-head against them. Someone on the team took it upon themselves to post as a prospect, book a demo with a competitor, and ask pointed questions about how the competitor positioned against us. In 30 minutes, they learned more than we could have gathered in weeks of research.

Of course, today, with AI, a lot of that information is available nearly instantly. And that’s the thing: the resources to learn have never been more available than today. If someone isn’t using the information available, they don’t really want to learn. The ones who are hungry to learn are doing the extra work to close the knowledge gap.

How to screen for this

Start simple by asking: “What research have you done on the company so far?”

One of my mentors early on would open every interview with that question. If the candidate said no, he’d end the interview on the spot. It sounds extreme. But if someone is applying for a job and hasn’t looked at your website, do you really want to hire them?

You can dig deeper in a few ways.

If you have a PLG product, did they sign up and try it? The candidates who come in having already explored the product are showing you exactly how they’ll approach everything else on the job.

Listen to the questions they ask you. Generic ones signal they came in cold. Specific ones signal someone who did the work. Someone who says, “I listened to your podcast, and you mentioned X… I was curious about that,” is showing you how they approach their work.

You can also ask how they typically get up to speed in a new place. At the early stage, no one is handing them a training program. You want someone who knows how to figure it out on their own.

3. Sharp EQ (emotional intelligence and empathy)

The third attribute is the hardest to screen for and the easiest to overlook: EQ. This is the ability to genuinely understand what the person across from you is dealing with and adjust accordingly. This one is important, but often overlooked.

People with high EQ will build strong relationships, be good teammates, work well with early customers, and intuitively sense where to invest their time and energy.

Think about what it means to sell to a CRO. That person is under constant pressure. CROs have one of the shortest tenures of any executive function because they’re always on the line. When you call them, you’re asking for time they don’t have, while others are constantly looking over their shoulder. The best salespeople understand that before they even pick up the phone.

The same goes for IT. The IT person is probably the most underappreciated and overworked person at most companies. They’re the ones keeping the lights on while no one notices. When you get them on a call, they likely have six fires burning at once. Do you respect that? Do you even know it?

I learned this the hard way early in my career. I heard a competitor of ours was meeting customers in person, so I reached out to an IT contact at a large company we were both trying to land and offered to fly out and take him to dinner. He said, “Dave, I don’t even like going to meals with my friends. I like your product, and it seems like it solves my problems, but I don’t need to go to dinner with you.”

That stuck with me. Reading the room means understanding who you’re talking to before the conversation even starts. You want a product manager who really listens to customers, understands their pain points, and connects with them. You want an engineering leader who understands the pressure your GTM team is facing as they approach the end of the quarter, still racing toward their quota.

The best go-to-market people I’ve worked with understand that in today’s world, nobody has to talk to you. They’re only on that call for one or more of these reasons: because they like you, trust you, or know they will get something out of the conversation.

One rep I worked with would find out a prospect’s favorite sports team before every call and show up wearing their jersey. It sounds like a small thing, but it worked because it was authentic. And that’s the key: authenticity.

Empathy that’s performed falls apart immediately. People see through it faster than you’d think. True top performers actually care about the person on the other side.

How to screen for this

Ask the candidate: “Describe the value your last company delivered to customers.”

Do they recite a value prop, or do they actually embody the customer’s pain? Do they mention names? Do they share specific stories?

For GTM roles, ask which customer they had the closest relationship with. Do they refer to the customer as an account, a number, or a metric? Or do they tell you the person’s name, their company, and what they were working through?

The ones with real empathy remember the relationship and tell you the entire story.

If you find someone with all three, don’t let them go

I’d guess that only about 5% of candidates will have all three of these attributes. And that’s what makes them so valuable.

If you can find someone who does all three (works their ass off, learns whatever is thrown at them, and genuinely cares about the people they work with), hold on to them. I’ve written before about how to treat your top performers, and it starts with recognizing them.

And if you’re the one joining an early-stage company, this is your playbook. Show up with these three things, and you will stand out.