These People Aren’t Gods: How European Founders Can Stop Making The #1 Mistake in US Recruiting

“When you read their profiles and interview them, you think one thing:  these people are gods.”  — European founder on early US hiring.

Despite numerous warnings, I continue to see many European founders fall into the same trap when it comes to hiring in the first years of their US expansion.  Sadly, it feels like one of those lessons you can only learn from experience.  That’s painful because failing on your first US hires comes at a high cost in both dollars and, more importantly, time. 

So, I thought I’d take one more run at solving this problem, based on a chat I had the other day with a European founder.

What causes the “these people are gods” problem? We Americans are:

• Natural storytellers who build narratives that can potentially mislead.
• Take credit much more freely than Europeans.
• Embellish our resumes and profiles, often turning the hype up to 11.

That’s why behavioral interviewing — drilling down into claims, asking “tell me about a time” questions that describe specific moments — is so important in the US. Here’s an example question sequence:

“So, you ran the budget process in 2023 as the head of finance?”

“Tell me how you laid out the process, the milestones, and timing?”

“Did anyone have problems with it?  Were there any disagreements?”

“When you ran the first budget meeting, what major challenge did you encounter and how did you manage it?” 

This approach eliminates generic answers discussing budgeting philosophy, telling you instead how they manage a budget process and, most importantly, whether they actually did.  Because few embellishers can survive multi-layer, drill-down questioning, you might eventually get a response like, “well, the CFO actually laid out the process that year and ran the first meeting.”

In the US we’re used to discounting career claims.  We drill down.  We ask, “what precise role did you play?” We use behavioral questions.  We check references, both those provided and backdoor.  It’s all a normal part of the process.  We do it without thinking.

But European founders are not used to all this.  They come from an understated culture where people tend to discount their accomplishments. To understand a European resume, an American might need to amplify it.  Think:  “yes, we grew the company from $20M to $200M but I was only part of the team that did that,” when they were actually its leader who built it from nothing.

What happens when a culture of understated accomplishment meets a culture of overstated achievement?   

“These people are gods.”  That’s what happens. 

Worse yet, remember this happens in the context of hiring your first US employees, who are typically salespeople and ergo top decile in storytelling and embellishment.

It’s a wonder that anyone successfully expands at all. 

Since this appears to be a lesson best learned by experience, I discovered a great trick the other day chatting with a European founder.  Provided you’ve already begun your US expansion:

Go look at the LinkedIn profiles of the first people you hired and then subsequently fired and see what they say today about their experience at your company.  You might be quite surprised at what you find.

Or, if you’re not that far along, go look at the LinkedIn profiles of the people you’ve hired and who are still on board.  Now that you know them, what do you think of how they described their past experience? How are they describing their current experience?

In both cases, you’ll get real, first-hand experience with American resume and profile inflation that should help you not just intellectually — but viscerally — understand the problem.  And it appears that without this visceral understanding, in many cases you won’t be able to fix it.

The alternative is literally to lose 12-24 months building, firing, and rebuilding your entire US team.  And I’m desperately hoping to help you avoid doing that.