Attracting and retaining talent is an expensive business. On top of the £6K you'll typically spend making the hire, the cost of having to exit people that were not the right fit is thought to cost anything up to £25K, and you'll then be repeating the hiring process once again.
I want to talk about why we should be spending more time assessing how people think about their own growth and why this is critical to success. We'll then go into how you can practically assess for this during the interview process, all the while ensuring that the candidate comes away from interviews with a positive experience.
What do we mean by a growth mindset?
A Growth Mindset is the belief that abilities and intelligence can be developed through dedication, hard work, and persistence - Carol Dweck
Fundamentally, we're assessing:
- If and how the candidate has handled scenarios where things didn't go to plan
- How they think about development and growth
- How they receive and give feedback
- How they handle change
Two examples - you can probably tell which answer was strongest
Question: "Tell me about a time where you identified a gap in your skillset, how did you address it and what was the outcome?"
Growth Mindset Response:
"I've always been strong technically - expert level with Python and SQL - but I knew I needed to improve my confidence speaking to larger groups. After reading Talk Like TED by Carmine Gallo (recommended by colleagues), I wanted to apply it practically. I started attending user forums with our product manager, first shadowing, then contributing. Within 9 months, I presented our customer analytics strategy and ran a Q&A for about 50 customers. I'm now working with junior analysts on a storytelling framework for presenting analyses."
This candidate came with a self-awareness of their gap and proactively worked with colleagues to gain exposure to situations that would help them to improve. They created a small plan with milestones and demonstrated quantifiable results. Further, they then began to also help colleagues level up their own presentation skills.
Fixed Mindset Response:
"I want to learn more about using AI with our data stack but it's not something we do much of. Our company has restrictions around what codegen tools we can use. I've read some articles on Snowflake Cortex and I've watched some YouTube videos about text to SQL generation but have not had the opportunity to test any of it."
This answer raises concerns because there's no intrinsic gap identified. The candidate feels limited by what is permitted within the company, but these tools are easily assessed and available within sandbox environments. They might have explored them as part of a private project. The barrier to entry for testing LLMs is now very low. There's no clear story here of genuine growth or a plan to grow.
Why assess for a growth mindset?
Change is constant
5 years ago, if I wanted to prototype a new analytics report, I'd be firing up Excel or Balsamiq with a rough wireframe for slicers, metrics, dimensions and charts. I'd then run this by a data analyst and refine. If I was really lucky and had access to a designer, I might get a Figma prototype, but this was quite an intensive process and somewhat of a luxury. Eventually, after a month or so, I might get the prototype out to end users for further feedback, prior to build.
Fast forward to present day, I can simply fire up Bolt, Loveable, Claude or any other of the myriad of AI tools and rapidly prototype something in 30 minutes that is based on the same set of data models my analysts use. Technology, goals, organisational structures all change and our ability as humans to adapt to this and learn new skills, and new ways of working is fundamental.
Change is an inescapable fact for all employees. For those working with early-stage companies, it's all encompassing. Resilience, problem solving and persistence are your daily prescription.
Feedback is critical to success
If you believe that feedback can help you to grow, you're more likely to be open to that prospect. Being able to both give and receive feedback effectively (and safely) means that you and those around you can course correct, change or learn new things. That level of flexibility and awareness means that you're likely to perform better than a colleague that is unable or unwilling to listen to others' feedback.
I've worked with talented people who struggled to receive feedback. Each time, performance issues followed - not because they lacked skill, but because they couldn't or wouldn't course-correct. The ability to hear feedback, even when it's uncomfortable, is not an easy skill to master but it's what separates good performers from great ones.
Creating space for failure
Part of innovation means trying (and failing), iterating and improving. Fear of failure can significantly limit your team's ability to build new things. Granted, much of this can stem from a broader company culture, but there are things we can do as leaders to help mitigate this.
At Momentus, I implemented an 'innovation day' concept where we created enough safety for teams to explore novel approaches to well-understood problems in event management. Creating the safety was a virtuous cycle. The team had breathing space to start exploring MCP approaches, LLMs, smarter API design and more. This in turn led to failures, dead ends and critical learning that we were able to bring into future development.
At Pollen we ran regular 'dogfood' sessions where our team attempted to use the analytics reports we were creating as if they were the end user. This enabled us to build a level of empathy that led to redesigns and an improvement to overall UX.
Creating these conditions for your team starts with hiring people who already think this way about their own development.
How to Assess
My favourite approach for assessing is to have interviewers blind score candidates against your pre-defined profile. At Pollen this meant panels that focused specifically on technical and environment alongside growth and motivation assessments. The recruiter brought panelists together at the end of the process where scores were discussed collectively (assuming technical success). No other discussions about scores were permitted until this stage and this helped us to avoid groupthink.
Each candidate achieved from 1 (no demonstrated experience/capability) to 5 (absolutely superstar, clear evidence at the right level). The hiring manager was then empowered to make the offer based on multiple interviews and interviewers assessing against a set criteria. The approach was as empirical as I'd seen and had the added benefit of providing clear and concise feedback for candidates on areas where they'd fallen short.
Your question bank
Before we get to the questions, a quick note on process. Growth mindset assessment works best when you're not just looking for 'right answers'. You want to hear how candidates think about challenge, failure, and development. That means creating space for them to tell real stories, not rehearsed responses. Look for specific stories with clear outcomes, not vague descriptions of general practices.
I hope I've made the case for assessing growth during your interview process. Here are some practical, evidence-based questions that I used regularly to gauge growth mindset. Pick a question from each section that most aligns with the environment that the candidate will be stepping into. Hopefully, some of these will have already been evidenced to some extent by the time you come to more formally assessing.
1. Personal Growth & Self-Development
| Theme | Question | Signals to Look For |
|---|---|---|
| Identifying growth opportunities | Can you recall a time where you identified a personal growth opportunity? What prompted the realisation and what methods did you use to aid your learning? How did you evaluate your progression? | Proactive self-reflection, clear learning plan, use of resources, concrete ways of measuring progress, ongoing iteration. |
| Addressing skill gaps | Can you recall a time when you identified a gap in your own skill-set that you wanted to address? Why did you want to address it? What happened? How did you measure your success? | Ownership of weaknesses, intrinsic motivation, structured approach to improvement, use of feedback or data to gauge success. |
| Current development focus | What is one skill you are actively trying to improve right now? What specific steps are you taking? | Evidence of continuous learning, clear plan (courses, mentors, projects), realistic self-assessment, consistency over time. |
| Comfort zone stretch | Describe a time you took on something that was outside your comfort zone. What scared you about it, and how did you get yourself through it? | Willingness to stretch, emotional honesty, strategies to manage fear, evidence of growth from the experience. |
2. Learning Agility & Problem-Solving
| Theme | Question | Signals to Look For |
|---|---|---|
| Learning on the fly | Have you ever had an important problem or task that you did not have the knowledge or skills to solve – how did you go about finding a solution? | Resourcefulness, experimentation, seeking experts or documentation, balancing speed and rigour. |
| Consolidating and sharing learning | Follow-up: How did you consolidate your learning? Did you help others learn about your subject? | Writing things down, building playbooks or templates, teaching others, avoiding single-point dependency. |
| Working with unclear requirements | Can you tell me about a time when you were asked to complete something but the requirements or priorities were unclear? | Clarifying questions, stakeholder alignment, iterative delivery, comfort with ambiguity. |
| Updating views with new information | Can you give an example of a time when new data or input made you change your mind on something important? What was the impact? | Intellectual humility, evidence-based decisions, communicating a change of direction, learning from being wrong. |
3. Feedback, Failure & Resilience
| Theme | Question | Signals to Look For |
|---|---|---|
| Responding to feedback | Can you recall a time you received feedback on a piece of work? How did you react to it? What was the outcome? | Non-defensive reaction, follow-up questions, specific changes made, long-term learning. |
| Seeking tough feedback | Tell me about a time you proactively sought out tough feedback. Why did you want it, and what did you do with it? | Actively inviting critique, desire to improve, translating feedback into action, resilience. |
| Work being challenged | Tell us about a time you have had someone question the approach or quality of your work. How did it make you feel? How did you explain your process and reasoning? | Emotional regulation, openness to being challenged, clarity of thinking, ability to adjust when needed. |
| Failure and what followed | Tell me about a time you failed at something important. What did you do next, and what changed as a result? | Ownership, no blame-shifting, clear lessons learned, concrete behavioural change, resilience. |
4. Adaptability & High-Growth Environment
| Theme | Question | Signals to Look For |
|---|---|---|
| Prioritising competing demands | Can you tell us about a time when you had lots of teams asking for support and you had to prioritise. How do you go about prioritising? What got left behind? | Clear prioritisation framework, transparency with stakeholders, willingness to say no, learning for next time. |
| Time vs quality trade-offs | Can you tell us about a time when you had to deliver something on a tight time scale and had to confront the trade-off between getting it done on time and getting it done well? How did you approach that trade-off, what were the results? | Pragmatism, risk assessment, communication of trade-offs, owning consequences. |
| Changing priorities | Can you tell us an example of when you worked hard on something, and then had to throw it all away because priorities changed? Talk us through what happened, and what did you do? | Low ego attachment, learning from change, re-using prior work where possible, positive attitude. |
5. Coaching, Teaching & Scaling Learning
| Theme | Question | Signals to Look For |
|---|---|---|
| Helping others improve | Tell us about a time when you identified an undesirable behaviour or a sub-optimal piece of work that was delivered by a colleague. How did you approach helping them to improve? What happened? | Empathy, clarity, focus on behaviours not character, collaborative problem-solving, follow-through. |
| Teaching what you learned | Describe a situation where you learned something difficult and then helped others get up to speed. How did you approach teaching it? | Ability to simplify complexity, patience, building shared tools or documentation, enjoyment of helping others grow. |
| View of talent vs effort | When you hear someone say 'I am just not a X person' (for example, 'not a numbers person' or 'not technical'), what goes through your mind? | Underlying beliefs about fixed vs growth ability, empathy, encouragement of learning, challenge to limiting beliefs. |
Bringing It All Together
Whether you're scaling a series B or transforming analytics at an enterprise company - the ability to learn, adapt, and course-correct often matters more than what someone already knows. I've seen technically brilliant people struggle because they couldn't accept feedback. I've also seen junior hires with the right mindset rapidly progress as through persistence, determination and self awareness.
These questions won't give you perfect signal, no interview process does. But they will help you move beyond surface-level competency checks towards understanding how someone thinks about their own development.
Skills can be taught. Tools can be learnt. But mindset is harder to change.