Have become a huge fan of @mattmochary 's idea of checking your energy level before and after chatting with someone, when deciding whether to work with them.
It seems a bit silly when you first hear about it, but over time it's become my #1 most important hiring heuristic.
Theory for excellence. "Excellence" is a surprisingly generalizable skill. People who've been great at *anything* are more likely to have the drive and self-discipline to excel even at something unrelated. In 2015, we hired a number of ex-Juilliard musicians with no engineering experience with the assumption that “people who know how to be