Hiring For Potential Vs. Experience: What Actually Works In Startups?

When you’re scaling a startup, it can be tempting to chase experience. A polished resume with five logos you recognise, a LinkedIn profile packed with big-budget campaigns or Series C growth metrics – it all looks reassuring. 

But here’s the thing: in early-stage teams, that kind of experience often doesn’t deliver what you actually need.

We've seen this firsthand. The real differentiator in a startup isn't what someone’s done, it's how quickly they can learn, adapt, and operate without a playbook. And that’s the heart of the debate on hiring for potential vs. experience.

So, yes – potential tends to beat pedigree. The catch? You have to know how to spot it.

In this blog, we’ll break down why potential tends to outperform experience in startup roles, what it actually looks like when you hire for it, and how we’ve seen it play out inside teams we’ve helped build.

Startups Aren’t Built for “Years of Experience”

If you’re a founder, you’ll know that sometimes, the job you hire for isn’t always the job the hire might end up doing. Priorities shift. Roadmaps change. One week it’s a product launch; the next it’s helping close your first enterprise client.

This is exactly why experience on paper doesn’t always translate into an impact on the ground. You’re not hiring someone to do the same thing over and over. You’re hiring someone who can figure out the next thing before you even ask.

Candidates with ten years of experience often struggle in startups because they need structure to perform. That works in big teams with layers of approvals and static job descriptions. But in a startup, structure is often just Notion pages and Slack threads.

The ones who thrive are those who learn fast, get uncomfortable quickly, and don’t need three onboarding calls to make a decision. They aren’t just doing work, they’re shaping it as they go.

 What ‘Potential’ Actually Looks Like

Potential isn’t code for “junior” or “cheap.” It looks like curiosity, self-awareness and how a person approaches something they haven’t done yet.

We helped a men’s healthcare startup hire an SEO executive a while ago. On paper, the candidate checked all the right boxes – confident, articulate, and had the kind of energy you want in early-stage hires. But once they joined, they struggled to get a handle on the work, lacked that ownership mindset, and made repeated execution mistakes. 

The startup needed someone who could run with ambiguity and adjust quickly as things changed. It just wasn’t the right fit and the team had to let them go after a few months.

This experience made us rethink how we define and evaluate potential, which is why we believe that potential is someone’s ability to pick things up quickly, adapt without needing constant direction, and treat problems like opportunities, not roadblocks. 

This brings us to the other side of the equation: experience. Valuable, yes, but not always in the way you'd expect.

Experience Has a Ceiling (and a Cost)

There’s nothing wrong with hiring experienced people. But if you're running a lean team and every hire has to pull their weight from day one, experience can become expensive (literally and operationally). 

Someone with five years of big-tech experience often has frameworks, preferences, and “how it’s usually done” baked in. They know how to manage processes, might not know how to build them. That’s not a knock; it’s just a mismatch. So it’s not that experienced candidates can’t thrive in startups. They can if they’re willing to adapt and rewire how they work. But if someone’s done the same job in the same way for too long, it can be tough to switch gears.

Also worth saying: experience usually costs more. And that’s not just salary. It’s time spent managing expectations, undoing rigid ways of thinking, and reshaping how someone contributes to a team that's still figuring things out.

The answer: Why does hiring for potential beat hiring for experience in startups?

Because someone with less experience but strong potential will usually adapt faster to how you work. They’re not coming in with five years of habits from slower-moving, layered teams. They’re faster to pick things up, more open to feedback, and less likely to say, “This isn’t how we used to do it.”

Not always, but often enough to shift how we think about hiring.

Not long after we started GrowthBuddy, things were picking up and our founder, Avani, realised she couldn’t do it all alone, so she decided to bring on an intern. The candidate she shortlisted had no prior experience, but Avani trusted her gut because she saw something that mattered more: potential.

That intern went on to become our first full-time employee a year later (she’s still with us today!).

That’s what potential looks like: someone who grows with the company, not someone the company has to work around.

The Hidden ROI Of Hiring For Potential

Hiring for potential isn’t just a feel-good strategy – it has compounding returns.

First, there’s cost. Candidates earlier in their careers tend to be more affordable, which matters when every dollar counts. But more importantly, they ramp up quickly because they’re not unlearning old processes. They want to figure things out and usually do.

Second, they stick around. We’ve seen candidates hired for potential show more long-term commitment than those who came in with one foot still in their last job title. When someone’s given a chance to grow, they usually take it seriously.

And then there’s culture. People with potential often raise the bar for energy, curiosity, and ownership. They don’t just fill a role, they evolve it. You’re not saving money by hiring for potential. You’re investing earlier in someone who can scale with you.

How to Hire for Potential?

Hiring for potential sounds good in theory. The tricky part is knowing what to look for.

Start with patterns. Instead of focusing only on technical skills, look for signals that suggest someone can thrive in ambiguity. Things like:

• Signs of self-starting – side projects or career switches that show initiative.

• Real skills picked up through self-learning, not just formal training.

• Stories of how they’ve handled uncertainty or solved problems without clear direction. 

You’re not just hiring for past output, you’re hiring for how they think when things break.

Experience still matters, but it's not the only signal. Someone who’s done one job well for a year and grown fast might be a better bet than someone who’s done the same job for five years in a static setup.

We’ve built our hiring method around this mindset – prioritising adaptability, clarity, and speed over inflated CVs. It's also the same approach we have outlined in great detail in our breakdown of how high-growth startups can run a more efficient hiring process.

If you don’t have the time to figure this out, that's fair. Most early-stage teams don’t. That’s exactly what we do. We vet for adaptability, not just achievement and help you hire A players without you spending weeks trying to guess who’ll work out.

This testimonial from Altitude’s CEO says it better than we could 👇

Final Thoughts

We’re not anti-experience. We just believe that in most early-stage teams, potential moves the needle.

Startups need people who can learn, unlearn, and adjust in real time, not just execute what they’ve already done. That’s why hiring for potential vs experience isn’t just a philosophical debate. It’s a hiring strategy that actually matches how startups operate.

If you're scaling and are tired of long hiring cycles or mismatched profiles, maybe it’s time to bet on someone ready to grow with you. Connect with us and we’ll find your next great hire – vetted, aligned, and ready to start in under 3 weeks.