When hiring, especially early-stage, you’re trying to match on three dimensions:
- Attitude: how someone approaches work, challenges, collaboration
- Belief: alignment with the mission, the vision, the why
- Skill: the capability to do the actual work
The acronym stuck. ABS. But the deeper insight wasn’t the framework itself. It was the claim that followed: matching on all three is hard. Pick two.
The Hiring CAP Theorem?
In distributed systems, CAP theorem says you can have consistency, availability, and partition tolerance, but not all three simultaneously. You make tradeoffs.
Is hiring similar? Can you truly optimize for Attitude, Belief, and Skill at the same time?
The intuition feels right. Perfect-match candidates are rare. The person with ideal skills might not believe in your specific mission. The true believer might have the wrong approach to work. The person with the right attitude might need years of skill development.
But unlike CAP, where the constraints are fundamental properties of distributed systems, the ABS tradeoff might be more about market scarcity and search costs. The perfect candidate exists somewhere. You just can’t afford to find them.
Or can’t wait for them.
The Rate of Change
Here’s where it gets interesting. These three dimensions aren’t equally fixed.
Skill is acquirable. Given time, resources, and willingness, most people can learn most things. A motivated person with the right attitude can develop skills faster than you’d expect. The timeline varies (weeks for some skills, years for others) but the direction is clear.
Belief can grow. People join companies for various reasons. Sometimes they start with partial belief and develop fuller conviction as they see the mission in action. Traction and adoption help immensely here: nothing builds belief like watching customers actually use and value what you’re building. Early employees of successful startups often report that their belief deepened over time. It wasn’t always there from day one.
Some beliefs are harder to change than others. Core values, fundamental worldviews: these shift slowly if at all. But belief in a specific company mission? That can develop.
Attitude is stubborn. How someone approaches problems, handles setbacks, collaborates with others: these patterns run deep. They’re formed over decades. They’re tied to personality, to past experiences, to habituated responses.
You can coach attitude at the margins. You can create environments that bring out better versions of people. But you can’t fundamentally rewire someone’s disposition in the timeframe of employment.
If this ordering is right, it suggests a priority: when forced to choose, weight attitude most heavily. Skills can be taught. Belief can grow. But if someone’s attitude is wrong, you’re fighting against something that probably won’t change.
The Priority Stack
So maybe the “pick two” framing isn’t quite right. Maybe it’s more like: prioritize in order of difficulty to change.
- Attitude (hardest to change): get this right first
- Belief (can develop): important but can grow with exposure
- Skill (most acquirable): least critical to match perfectly upfront
This flips the conventional hiring wisdom, which tends to lead with skill. Can they do the job? Do they have the experience? Have they done this before?
Those questions matter. But they might matter less than: How do they respond when things go wrong? How do they work with people who disagree with them? Do they take ownership or make excuses?
Where This Might Be Wrong
Skill minimums are real. You can’t hire someone with zero relevant skills and expect attitude to carry them. There’s a baseline below which attitude doesn’t matter because the person simply can’t contribute. The question is where that baseline sits, and it’s probably lower than most hiring processes assume.
Some beliefs are load-bearing. If your company exists to solve a specific problem in a specific way, and someone fundamentally doesn’t believe that problem matters, attitude alone won’t bridge the gap. Some missions require conviction from day one.
Attitude is observable late. You can assess skills in an interview. You can probe beliefs through questions. But attitude reveals itself under pressure, over time, in the accumulation of small decisions. By the time you really know someone’s attitude, you’ve already hired them.
This suggests investing heavily in reference checks and trial periods. But it also suggests humility: you’re going to get some wrong.
Culture changes attitude. Strong teams can shift how people work. Someone with mediocre attitude in a dysfunctional environment might flourish in a healthy one. The causality runs both ways.
So maybe it’s not just “screen for attitude” but “build an environment where good attitude can emerge.”
The Startup Context
This framework might apply differently at different stages.
Early stage: Attitude and belief dominate. You’re asking people to join uncertainty. Skills matter less because the work itself is undefined; it will shift constantly. What you need are people who thrive in that environment and believe it’s worth doing.
Growth stage: Skill starts mattering more. You know what you’re building now. You need people who can execute specific functions at scale. Attitude still matters but the variance decreases: more process, clearer expectations.
Mature stage: All three matter roughly equally. You can afford to optimize. The tolerance for development is higher because timelines are longer.
The “pick two” constraint binds hardest when you’re small and moving fast. Every hire is a larger bet. You don’t have the bandwidth to develop skills or nurture belief if attitude is wrong.
What This Means Practically
Following this logic:
Interview for attitude. Design questions and situations that reveal how people work, not just what they know. Look for patterns across stories. How do they talk about past failures? Past collaborators? Past constraints?
Probe belief carefully but don’t require full conviction. Ask why they’re interested. Listen for genuine curiosity versus performed enthusiasm. Partial belief plus strong attitude often beats full belief plus weak attitude.
Test skills but don’t over-index. Verify the baseline. Understand the gap. But don’t disqualify great attitude and belief because skills aren’t perfect. Calculate the development timeline and factor it in.
Reference check for attitude specifically. Don’t ask “would you work with them again?” Ask “how did they handle the hardest moment you witnessed?” The stories reveal more than the ratings.
Bottom Line
One thing seems clear: you gotta have ABS in the team. Attitude, Belief, Skill, in that order.
Open questions remain: how much does skill scarcity shape this view, how reliably does attitude actually predict, and when does “right attitude” become bias in disguise. All worth examining.
The framework feels useful. The conventional hiring sequence might be backwards, or at least worth questioning.
Hiring is prediction under uncertainty. Every framework is a compression of experience into heuristics. ABS is one compression. It emphasizes what’s hard to change over what’s easy to develop.
Whether it’s the right compression: that remains to be seen. If you’d like to help us find out, we’re hiring.