Hiring bar for leaders

How they treat the room, not only how they treat the compiler. Hiring is culture with a start date.

Candidate

Role / date

Signals in the room

Treats juniors as colleagues, not an audience. Can explain a technical call to a non-engineer without condescension. Disagrees without scoring points. Invites a minority view. Names a time they reversed themselves in public. Talks about growing someone, not only shipping something. Asks about the team they would inherit — not only the architecture. Bad-news story: they delivered it early, not decorated.

Missed signals (write what you saw)

Hire / no / tighten the loop

A no without a better process is just a no. If you pass, write what the next search must catch earlier.