You and your cofounder both interviewed the same senior engineer. Your cofounder came out saying "hire her today." You came out uneasy and could not quite say why. Now there is a candidate waiting on an answer and two founders who each think the other one is wrong.
Short answer: do not settle it by arguing, and do not settle it by splitting the difference. Each of you writes down, separately and before talking, what you saw against the three or four things the role actually needs. Then you compare evidence, not verdicts. Most founder disagreements about a candidate turn out to be one of three things, and each has a different fix.
Why two founders see the same candidate differently
It is rarely that one of you is a bad judge of people. In the hiring loops I sit in on, the split almost always comes from one of these.
You were testing different things. Your cofounder spent an hour on product and customers. You spent an hour on how the candidate handles a messy production problem. The candidate was strong in one room and average in the other. Both of you are right about what you saw.
You weigh the same signal differently. The candidate said "I would rewrite that service" twice. Your cofounder heard confidence. You heard someone who reaches for a rewrite before understanding the system. Same evidence, different reading.
One of you is reacting to something unrelated to the job. Rapport, a shared former employer, a confident delivery, a nervous one. This is the uncomfortable one, and it is common. Gut feel is information, but it is not evidence until you can point at something specific the candidate said or did.
Knowing which of these you are in tells you what to do next. Arguing louder does not.
Write it down before you talk
The single most useful habit for a founding team that hires together: each interviewer writes their notes and a score before hearing anyone else's view. It sounds bureaucratic for a two-person company. It is the opposite. It takes ten minutes and it stops the more senior or more confident founder from anchoring the other.
Keep the scorecard short. For a first senior engineer, I usually use four rows:
- Judgment on trade-offs. Did they ask what the constraint was before proposing a fix? Did they name what they would give up?
- Shipping in an unfinished environment. Evidence they have built something useful without a platform team behind them.
- Communication with non-engineers. Could they explain a technical risk to you in plain terms?
- Ownership. Did they talk about problems they owned end to end, or problems that happened near them?
For each row, write a score from 1 to 4 and one sentence of evidence: a quote or a specific thing they did. "Seemed sharp" is not evidence. "Asked how many customers would hit the slow page before proposing a cache" is.
If you want a deeper version of what to look for, the questions in how to screen a senior engineer for judgment map straight onto the first row.
Compare evidence row by row
Now sit down together, put the two scorecards side by side, and only discuss the rows where you differ by two points or more. Rows where you agree need no discussion.
For each disagreement, each founder answers one question: what specifically did you see? Usually one of three things happens.
- One of you has evidence and the other has an impression. The one with the impression updates. This resolves most splits within twenty minutes.
- You both have evidence, and it conflicts. The candidate was inconsistent across rooms. That is a real finding. Decide which room matters more for this role, or get one more data point aimed squarely at the gap.
- You agree on the evidence but weigh it differently. Now you are not arguing about the candidate, you are arguing about what the role needs. Settle that first, in writing, then the candidate decision usually follows.
When you still disagree
Sometimes the evidence is genuinely mixed and you still land on opposite sides. A few rules that have held up for small teams:
Get one more targeted data point, not a whole new round. If the doubt is about production judgment, run a 45-minute working session on a real incident from your own history. If the doubt is about how they work with others, a backchannel reference aimed at that exact question does more than a fourth interview. The reference check questions that actually tell you something are built for this.
A strong no from the person who will work with them most should count for more. If you will be managing this engineer day to day, your reservations carry more weight than your cofounder's enthusiasm, and vice versa.
Do not hire as a compromise. "Let's hire them and see" feels like a middle path. For your first or second senior engineer it is not. A wrong senior hire typically costs you six months: three to realise it, one or two to act, and another to recover. If neither of you can get to a confident yes, the answer is no.
Do not let the clock decide. A candidate with another offer creates pressure to skip the comparison step. Ask for two more days. A serious candidate will give them, and if one will not, that tells you something too.
What this says about your hiring process
If you and your cofounder disagree on most candidates, the problem is usually upstream of the debrief. Either you never agreed on what the role is for, or each of you is running a different interview with no overlap.
Fix it before the next candidate:
- Write a one-paragraph role brief: what this person owns in their first six months, and what they explicitly do not own.
- Assign each founder specific rows of the scorecard to test, so the loop covers everything once instead of some things twice.
- Use a shared work sample. A short, realistic exercise gives both founders the same evidence to look at. Our note on replacing the take-home test covers a format that works without an engineer on staff.
If neither founder is technical, the debrief has a blind spot: neither of you can test the engineering judgment row with confidence. That is the most common reason founders bring in an outside senior engineer for the loop. It is one of the things a fractional CTO engagement covers, and it is far cheaper than a bad hire.
FAQ
Should the CEO have the final say on an engineering hire?
Only as a tie-breaker of last resort. If the CEO overrides the cofounder who will manage the engineer, you have a manager who did not choose their report, which tends to go badly. Better to agree upfront that either founder can veto a senior hire.
Is gut feel worth anything in hiring?
It is a prompt to look for evidence, not a verdict. If you feel uneasy, go back to your notes and find the moment that caused it. If you cannot find one, give the feeling less weight.
How long should a founder debrief take?
With written scorecards, fifteen to thirty minutes. If it runs past an hour you are probably debating what the role is, not the candidate.
What if we disagree after the hire?
Then you have a performance conversation, not a hiring one. Agree on the three outcomes that would count as success at 90 days before the engineer starts, so you are judging the same thing.
If you are about to make your first senior engineering hire and want a second pair of experienced eyes on the loop, book a call and we will look at your process together.