The interview had gone well. They were talkative, curious, and open. Then they joined. And became very quiet. It took me nine months to understand what had actually happened.
They were a fresher. First job. And in the interview, they had been everything I was hoping for. Engaged, expressive, willing to talk through their thinking. They asked questions. They showed genuine interest in the problem space. The conversation felt alive in a way that made me feel confident about the hire.
Then they joined. And within the first few weeks, something had changed. Or perhaps something had simply become visible that the interview had not shown me.
The First Three Months
I gave them the benefit of the doubt for the first three months. A new job is overwhelming. New tools, new people, new ways of working, new expectations that have not been made fully explicit yet. I had seen confident people take time to find their footing. I assumed the quietness was adjustment. I assumed they would open up.
So I structured the work around that assumption. They joined one of our larger products alongside a more experienced designer. We gave them the simpler research pieces, kept the stakeholder interaction limited, gave them someone to shadow and learn from. The idea was straightforward: start small, build confidence, take on more. The classic onboarding arc.
Three months passed. Then six. Then nine.
What I Was Looking at and What I Was Missing
For most of those nine months, I was looking at their output. The work they were producing. And I was giving feedback on the work, trying to help them improve it. That is what design leaders do in reviews. You look at what has been made and you try to make it better.
What I was not paying enough attention to was how they approached a problem in the first place.
They were not asking questions. Not the kind of questions that come from genuine wanting-to-know. They were not challenging the brief or pushing back on the direction or trying to understand why we were building something, not just what we were building. They would take a direction and execute it almost exactly as given. Carefully. Accurately. Without curiosity about what lay behind it.
I tried giving them more space. More context. More opportunities to bring their perspective into a conversation. I gave direct feedback about the pattern I was seeing. We tried to work on it together.
But there are some things you can coach. And there are some things you can create the conditions for, but you cannot manufacture.
Curiosity turned out to be one of them.
What They Said When They Left
When they eventually left, they said something that stayed with me: this company is not for beginners.
I sat with that for a while. Because I do not think it was quite right, and I also think I understood exactly what they meant.
Startups can absolutely be places for beginners. Some of the fastest learning I have seen has happened in early-stage environments where the structure is thin and the exposure is wide. But they are difficult places for people who do not yet have the internal drive to keep learning when nobody has laid out the next step for them. When the path is not clear, you need to want to find it. And when the brief is ambiguous, you need to want to resolve the ambiguity rather than wait for someone else to resolve it for you.
That is not a beginner problem. It is a curiosity problem. And the two look very similar from the outside, especially early on.
What Changed About How I Hire
I made the wrong hire partly because I was looking at the wrong signals. The interview had rewarded articulacy, and they were articulate. It had rewarded enthusiasm, and they were enthusiastic. What it had not surfaced was whether they were curious when there was nothing obvious to be enthusiastic about.
That distinction changed something about how I approach hiring now.
I do not look for people who already know everything. I look for people who want to know what they do not know. Who ask the second question after the first one is answered. Who notice something does not make sense and go looking for the reason. Who have an internal pull toward figuring things out, not just executing what has been figured out by someone else.
Those signals are harder to surface in an interview. They require questions designed to create ambiguity rather than invite performance. Asking someone to respond to an unclear brief. Asking what they would want to know that they have not been told. Watching whether they sit with uncertainty or immediately try to resolve it by assuming.
Skills can be taught. Curiosity is much harder to install. And nine months is a long time to learn that lesson when you could have learned it in the first conversation.