In a startup, you are not only hiring for the role in front of you. You are hiring for the role it may become.
Startup roles rarely stay still.
A person may join to solve one problem, then find themselves solving a different one 6 months later. The product may shift. The market may narrow. A founder may change direction after customer feedback. A team of 10 may become a team of 30.
That does not mean founders should hire vague generalists for every role.
It means interviews need to assess more than current task fit.
The real question is not only “Can this person do the job today?” It is “Can this person keep contributing when the job changes?”
Separate what will change from what must stay stable
Before interviewing, founders and hiring teams should split the role into 2 parts.
First, the parts likely to change: tools, priorities, market assumptions, reporting lines, commercial focus or product direction.
Second, the parts that need to stay stable:
- learning speed;
- judgement under uncertainty;
- ownership;
- communication;
- evidence-led decision-making;
- Impact & contribution.
These stable criteria should become the foundation of the interview.
Otherwise, the team risks hiring someone who is perfect for today’s version of the role, but poorly suited to the company’s next stage.
A changing role does not need a vague interview. It needs clearer criteria.
Do not confuse domain experience with adaptability
Domain experience can be useful.
A candidate who already understands the market may ramp faster and avoid obvious mistakes.
But experience alone does not prove adaptability.
A startup interview should test how someone responds when assumptions break. Ask about moments where they had to change direction, rebuild a plan, learn quickly or make decisions without perfect information.
Useful questions include:
- “Tell us about a time a plan stopped making sense. What changed?”
- “How did you decide what to keep, change or abandon?”
- “What evidence shifted your view?”
- “How did you bring others with you?”
The aim is not to reward confident storytelling. It is to find evidence of how someone thinks when the ground moves.
Use the same scenario across candidates
Scenario questions are useful, but only when they are structured.
If every candidate gets a different hypothetical, comparison becomes weak. The interview starts to test improvisation more than judgement.
A better approach is to create one role-relevant scenario and use it consistently.
For example, ask each candidate how they would respond if a key customer segment changed, a launch slipped or a core assumption proved wrong.
Before the interviews begin, define what a strong answer should show:
- Prioritisation: Can they identify what matters first?
- Trade-off thinking: Can they explain what they would stop doing?
- Risk awareness: Can they spot second-order consequences?
- Communication: Can they keep stakeholders aligned?
- Learning: Can they adapt without losing momentum?
When the role is uncertain, the interview should make judgement visible.
Interview for contribution to the next stage
A strong startup hire should not only perform the current tasks.
They should increase the team’s ability to operate at the next stage.
That might mean creating process where there was chaos, improving customer insight, raising product judgement or helping others make better decisions.
This is why interviewing for changing roles needs structure. It pushes the conversation beyond credentials and asks a better question: how will this person keep adding value as the company changes?
Where Maslow fits
At Maslow, we are building the Interview Operating System for structured interviews, clearer interview evidence and better-informed hiring decisions.
Maslow helps founders and hiring teams define what needs to be assessed, guide the conversation and capture decision-ready evidence across candidates while keeping human judgement central.
That structure matters most when the role is ambiguous. Without it, teams often hire the person who sounds most adaptable rather than the person who has shown the strongest evidence of adapting.
Further reading
For a longer version of this article, read Maslow’s full piece on interviewing for changing roles.
Interview for the role and the next version of it
Maslow is opening an early access cohort for founders and hiring teams that want to run more structured interviews, capture clearer evidence and improve hiring confidence while keeping human judgement central.
When the role will change, the interview needs to test more than today’s tasks. It needs to reveal how someone thinks, learns and contributes when the company moves.