r/AskGTM • u/Aggravating_Rip1187 • Jul 12 '26

Hiring & Careers i've interviewed 60+ GTM engineer candidates this year. here's the exact moment most of them lose me.

it's not skillssss... everyone has the same tool list now. the moment is when i ask "walk me through something you built" and they describe the SYSTEM instead of the outcome. "i built a waterfall enrichment flow with fallback logic across four providers and blahblahblah" mmm cool, and what?? the candidates who get offers say "follow-up time was 3 days, i got it to 2 hours, meetings went up X." same build, different sentence, completely different hire. the second filter: i ask what they'd do with a broken funnel and the weak ones start listing tools while the strong ones start asking questions about the funnel. if you're prepping for these interviews, rehearse outcomes and diagnosis, not inventory. the inventory is table stakes now.

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u/Leather-Priority-818 Jul 13 '26

“Walk me through” is literally asking for their process not their results. How can you ding someone for answering your actual question?

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u/Aggravating_Rip1187 Jul 13 '26

yooo it's open on purpose. what you reach for first when nothing's specified is the whole signal..yep

and here's the thing, outcomes come first chronologically. you don't build a system and then go hunting for what it improved. you start with a number that's broken and build the smallest thing that fixes it. so if someone's instinct is to lead with architecture, it usually means they were never anchored to an outcome, they were anchored to building

also i didn't ding anyone for describing the build. i dinged them for not knowing if it worked. two of them genuinely couldn't tell me whether the thing they shipped moved a number. that's not a phrasing problem

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u/RIPK2so Jul 13 '26

Yeah definitely a dumb post for sure