First 10 Hires: How to screen for 'shapeshifters' who outperform their resume

Stop hiring for experience. Start hiring for aptitude.

Your first 10 hires aren't just employees — they're co-founders in disguise. And hiring them requires a different playbook than what comes later. You don't have the luxury of systematized interview loops or dedicated recruiters. You need to evaluate candidates with more nuance, because a single mis-hire at this stage doesn't just hurt productivity — it can unravel speed, morale, and trust across your entire team.

The conventional wisdom says hire generalists early. But Rillet, the Sequoia-backed accounting platform processing billions of dollars in transactions, discovered something better: hire shapeshifters. These are candidates who can own bizops on Monday, run sales on Wednesday, and jump into recruiting by Friday — not because they're passable at everything, but because they attack every problem from first principles.

The difference between a generalist and a shapeshifter? 

Generalists can do many things adequately. Shapeshifters achieve depth across functions because they attack every problem from first principles. They don't need a playbook — they write one.

The problem is spotting people who can reach this level of context switching. It can be tough to tell them apart from polished candidates who've learned to tell good stories. Standard behavioral questions won't separate them. You need a rubric that pressure-tests for ownership, technical judgment, and how candidates operate when the map runs out.

This is the exact interview framework Rillet uses internally. It includes the question sequences that reveal whether someone actually drove the work or just participated, the follow-up patterns that cut through vague answers, and the scoring criteria that keep your hiring bar from drifting.

Rillet's founding team members Alysha Salinger and Ben Cheung developed this rubric as part of First 10 Hires, a crash course for early-stage founders making their most critical hires. Because at your stage, one wrong hire doesn't just cost salary — it costs six months of momentum you can't get back.