The Three-Chapter Hiring Playbook: Find, Assess, Close
Hire the top 1% by hunting signs of excellence, then closing with the whole exec team and the family
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 7
- Confidence
- 95%
Luc Levesque's personal hiring playbook, built from first principles while leading from Ottawa with no local mentors to copy. It splits hiring into three chapters — finding talent, assessing talent, closing talent — and gives each chapter a concrete test. Finding and assessing hinge on 'signs of excellence' (repeated, verifiable standout achievements); closing hinges on mobilising executives, involving the candidate's spouse and family, and refusing to let momentum die.
Origin
Developed by Luc Levesque after selling TravelPod to TripAdvisor and scaling his own teams from Ottawa, then sharpened by being on the receiving end of Mark Zuckerberg's seven-month personal recruitment of him to Facebook, and again by Tobi Lütke's recruitment of him to Shopify.
Core principles
- 01Past performance is the best predictor of future performance — look for repeated excellence, not a single hit.
- 02Once you lead, your team's output is your hiring quality; hiring becomes the craft you must be world class at.
- 03Peers and executives are always willing to help close — going it alone with a recruiter wastes the company's strongest asset.
- 04A job change is a family decision, not an individual one.
- 05'No' rarely means no — it usually means the momentum was allowed to drop.
How to run it
- 1
Screen for three signs of excellence
Open every interview by walking the candidate's path — professional and non-professional — hunting for things they did that others did not: founded something, won an award, medalled, built something from nothing. Aim for roughly three such signals before you get excited. Tally the pluses and red flags as you go and form a picture at the end.
Pro tip This works at any seniority. Early-career candidates have signs of excellence too — they're just outside work.
Watch out Don't over-pivot on one signal. Look at the full picture.
- 2
Hunt the boss-came-back-to-poach signal
The strongest single reference signal is when a candidate's former manager left the company and then returned to poach them. That manager has the most complete knowledge of the person's performance and is staking their own reputation on the hire. Ask directly whether this ever happened, and to whom.
- 3
Test the top of their stack with one question
Ask: 'Teach me something about growth that I don't already know' (substitute engineering, product, or whatever the domain is). It reveals what they believe is the smartest thing they know, and opens a real conversation about how deeply they own their craft. Whether you already knew the answer is irrelevant.
Pro tip The answer tells you if they generated their own learnings or are repeating a playbook they read.
- 4
Recruit your executives into the close
Don't leave closing to yourself and the recruiter. Pull in your peers and the exec team — every leader knows how important talent is and will happily take a call, a dinner, or a meeting to close someone great.
- 5
Make it personal — bring in the spouse and family
Find out what is actually holding the candidate back. If it is a life constraint (location, family, schooling), engage the spouse directly: dinner, meetings with executives, options built around the real blocker rather than the stated one.
Pro tip Fly out and have breakfast with the family if that's what the constraint requires.
Watch out This only works if the interest is genuine. Manufactured intimacy over a role you don't badly want reads as manipulation.
- 6
Be relentless and never let momentum drop
Treat the initial 'no way I can make this work' as a starting position. Keep the conversation warm for as long as it takes — months, or years — with a rotating cast of leaders keeping momentum alive.
Pro tip Track the candidates you couldn't close and revisit when their situation changes; timing is often the only real blocker.
- 7
Hand new joiners your blueprint
Write a 'blueprint' — a short document listing your quirks, working preferences, and how you operate — and give it to everyone who joins your team. It compresses a year of awkward calibration conversations into a single read.
In the wild
Levesque was living in Canada with strong personal reasons he could not move. Rather than accept the no, Mark Zuckerberg involved the entire Facebook executive team, flew Levesque and his wife Andrea down for dinner with him and Priscilla, had Andrea meet many of the company's executives, and kept the conversation alive for months while working through what was actually holding them back.
→ Seven months from 'there is no way I can make this work' to moving to Palo Alto and joining Facebook, where Levesque worked on Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp.
Levesque and Tobi Lütke had been discussing working together for over ten years. Lütke never let the thread die, and when the timing finally aligned he flew out with Fiona and had breakfast with Levesque and Andrea to review offers in person.
→ Levesque joined Shopify as Chief Growth Officer.
Common mistakes
Hiring on the public halo
Weighting a large Twitter following, conference talks, or a popular Substack as if it were evidence of craft. A public profile is not a disqualifier, but it is not a qualification either. Levesque made this mistake several times; the celebrity hire rarely lands as expected.
Going it alone on the close
Leaders default to working the candidate themselves or handing it to recruiting, leaving the exec team's closing power completely unused.
Rewarding activity instead of impact
Recognising who works hardest and longest rather than what outcomes shipped. Hard work correlates with impact but is not the same thing, and cultures that reward the former stop breaking through.
Is it for you?
Best for
Managers and executives who have crossed the point where their leverage comes from the people they hire rather than the work they personally do, and who are hiring for the top 1%.
Not ideal for
High-volume commodity hiring where a signs-of-excellence bar would leave most seats unfilled, or early founders who cannot yet offer a role worth a seven-month pursuit.
From the transcript
“so I think of it in three different chapters if you will there's finding Talent assessing talent and closing talent”
“the best predictor of future performance is past performance so I'm looking for what I call signs of Excellence”
“when somebody's boss leaves the company and then comes back to poach”
“the first one would be that you know Mark really involved the entire executive team it wasn't just me talking to recruiting or Talent OR…”
“involving somebody's spouse and family I think is a really good idea because it's a very personal decision to change company”
“the third thing is just to be absolutely Relentless and don't give up and don't let momentum drop”
“teach me something about growth that I don't already know”
From the episode
Leveraging growth advisors, hiring well, mastering SEO, and honing your craft
Luc Levesque (Shopify, Meta, TripAdvisor)