SPOTAK: Decoding Hiring Intuition
Trust your gut on candidates, then use six traits to translate that gut into words others can act on.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 90%
A hiring framework for leaders with strong pattern-matched intuition. SPOTAK is a checklist of six traits — Smart, Passionate, Optimistic, Tenacious, Adaptable, Kind — used not as a top-down scorecard but as a decoder: after you react to a candidate, you walk the list to name why the gut said yes or no so the decision can be communicated to others.
Origin
MacInnis says his hiring is 'born of batting practice' — tens of thousands of candidate interactions training the model in his brain. He rejects HR's 'don't trust intuition' orthodoxy: if your intuition is good, rely on it, but then decode it. He tips his hat to an unnamed originator of the SPOTAK acronym.
Core principles
- 01A well-trained intuition (built on thousands of at-bats) is a legitimate hiring instrument.
- 02Raw intuition is useless to others until decoded into expressible reasons.
- 03SPOTAK is a bottom-up decoder, not a top-down scorecard.
- 04Pair it with the alpha/beta lens to also judge role fit, not just candidate quality.
How to run it
- 1
Register the gut reaction
Notice your instinctive yes/no/'didn't click' after meeting the candidate. Don't suppress it.
- 2
Walk the six traits to decode it
Go down Smart, Passionate, Optimistic, Tenacious, Adaptable, Kind and find which one your gut was reacting to — e.g. 'they trashed their last manager and played victim; that's not optimistic.'
Pro tip Optimism red flag: a candidate who casts themselves as a victim of their last companies' performance.
Watch out Don't invert it into a rigid top-down rubric; it works as an after-the-fact explainer.
- 3
Layer in role fit
Separately ask whether a strong candidate matches the surface via alpha/beta: a great person can be wrong for a specific high-alpha or low-beta role.
In the wild
MacInnis likes a candidate but something's off; running SPOTAK reveals they weren't passionate/optimistic — they spoke badly of a prior manager and blamed their companies.
→ The vague gut 'no' becomes a specific, shareable reason.
Common mistakes
Distrusting a trained gut
Following HR dogma to ignore intuition wastes a genuinely predictive, batting-practice-trained signal.
Leaving intuition undecoded
An un-articulated 'I just didn't like them' can't be scrutinized, taught, or defended, and invites bias.
Is it for you?
Best for
Experienced hiring managers with high interview volume who need to make and justify fast people calls.
Not ideal for
Early-career interviewers whose intuition isn't yet trained on enough at-bats to trust.
From the transcript
“people are smart, passionate, optimistic, tenacious, adaptable, and kind. Those five things. Six.”
“you need to decode you need to decode your intuition so that it can be expressed to other people productively.”
“If you have a good intuition, you should absolutely rely on your intuition.”
From the episode
10 contrarian leadership truths every leader needs to hear
Matt MacInnis (Rippling)