Tom FerrariVP - GTM & Technology Search, UltraTalent · Placing elite sellers & builders at startups

Hiring for Attitude: Why Resilience Beats Skills in Tech

21 Jul 2025 · 3 min

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2:41

In this interview segment, the speakers discuss the difficulties of rapidly scaling a global technology business, emphasizing that hiring the wrong attitude can be costly. They describe challenges such as coordinating across time zones, cultures, and languages, and the failure to establish clear internal communication during a rapid growth phase. The conversation highlights a key mistake: hiring too quickly without ensuring cultural and attitudinal fit. The speakers argue that the ideal hire should combine deep knowledge of the telco and unified communications (UCaaS) industry with traits like resilience, resourcefulness, and a strong hunger to win—qualities often missing in candidates from large telcos (Cisco, AT&T, Verizon, BT) who may be accustomed to structured environments and generous compensation. The segment underscores the importance of slowing hiring to prioritize attitude, crafting repeatable messaging, and building a team that truly “gets it” to sustain significant revenue growth.

But getting attitude, hiring the wrong attitude was very costly for us.
Now, the moment we say growth, people love the ramp story. But not often do people, at least looking outside in, realize the significant challenges that you need to face and that you overcome. And so, what were some of the toughest challenges that you faced while getting to that Significant revenue.
Oh, and there's no doubt about it, creating a global technology business is really hard. Not just about time zones and cultures and languages and things like that, but just building the team and just being able to build the team in a way that everyone gets it. I think one of the most Challenging issues is how do you get everyone on the same page? We had the opportunity to do the land grab, to grow rapidly, grow revenue rapidly. And I made some mistakes earlier on that, you know, we were too, too quick to hire. And then we didn't really focus on getting communication internally to an art form. We had to chunk those messages down. and just repeat them constantly. And we also had to be able to slow down hiring to make sure we're getting the right fit. I'll spend a little bit of time on that because when you think about like who was the right person to hire, we wanted someone who understood the telco industry, understood the unified communications sector, therefore understood SaaS sales. We wanted them to be resilient, resourceful, worked in a startup, um, and had kind of like this psychological need to win, you know, that, that real hunger. And invariably, um, the people that understood telco and UCaaS, unified communication, came from big telcos. They came from Cisco, or they came from AT&T, or Verizon, or British Telecom. And therefore, often they weren't resilient. They weren't resourceful because they expected things. They'd always had things given to them on a platter. And they were used to a big bank salary. They were used to options. And we wanted people who really were just so hungry to win that they were prepared to put the long hours in and to be exceptionally resourceful.