Hire People Who Give a Shit
Why the candidates who care deeply outperform everyone else — and how to find them before your competitors do.
Stephen Klenert
SVP, Optical Network Operations · 365 Data Centers
I've hired hundreds of people over twenty-five years. I've built teams from scratch, inherited teams mid-flight, and rebuilt teams after acquisitions. I've made every hiring mistake in the book — chasing credentials, overweighting experience, falling for interview polish. And after all of it, I keep coming back to one truth that sounds too simple to be useful but is actually the whole game:
Hire people who give a shit.
Not people who say they care during interviews. Not people whose resumes suggest they might care. People who actually, viscerally, personally give a shit about doing excellent work — whether anyone is watching or not.
“The difference between good and great isn't skill. It's how much someone cares when no one is watching.”
Why they're exponentially more valuable
People who care deeply don't just do their jobs better. They transform the operating environment around them. Here's what I've observed across every company I've built or led:
Ownership
They don't wait to be told. They see the gap and fill it because leaving it empty feels wrong to them.
Signal
Caring people attract other caring people. They become your best recruiting filter without trying.
Contagion
Their intensity spreads. Teams with even one person who truly cares start performing differently.
Invention
They find solutions that weren't in the playbook because they refuse to accept 'that's how we do it.'
They think differently — completely differently
Most people approach work transactionally. They do what's asked, hit the metrics they're measured on, and go home. There's nothing wrong with that — it's a perfectly reasonable way to have a career.
But people who give a shit operate on different firmware entirely. They see their work as an extension of their identity. A poorly executed project isn't just a miss — it's a personal failure. A great outcome isn't just a win — it's a validation of who they are. This isn't neurosis. It's craftsmanship.
The transactional worker asks: “What do I need to do to not get fired?”
The craftsman asks: “How do I make this excellent?”
These are fundamentally different orientations toward work, and they produce fundamentally different outcomes over time.
“One person who gives a shit is worth more than three who just show up.”
The hiring mistake that compounds
Here's what I got wrong for years: I hired for skills and experience, assuming motivation would follow. Someone with ten years of relevant experience must care about this domain, right? Someone with impressive credentials must be driven to maintain them, right?
Wrong. Credentials and experience tell you what someone has done. They tell you nothing about why they did it — or whether they'll bring that same energy to your organization. Some of the most credentialed people I've hired were coasting on autopilot. Some of the most driven were coming from completely different industries with no relevant experience at all.
When you hire someone who doesn't care, the damage isn't linear — it compounds. They hire people like themselves. They normalize mediocrity. They drive out the people who do care, because caring people can't stand working alongside indifference. One bad hire becomes a cultural cancer that's far harder to excise than it was to prevent.
It's not about hours. It's about investment.
I want to be clear: caring doesn't mean working eighty-hour weeks. I've seen plenty of burnout victims who worked insane hours without caring about the work itself — they were just anxious, insecure, or trying to prove something unrelated to the actual job.
Real caring shows up differently. It's in the questions someone asks during onboarding. It's in the unprompted suggestions for improvement. It's in the refusal to ship something they know isn't ready. It's in the way they talk about the work when they think management isn't listening.
People who give a shit don't need to be managed. They need to be pointed in the right direction and then trusted. They'll figure out the rest, because figuring it out is part of what they find rewarding. Your job as a leader shifts from oversight to obstacle removal — clearing the path so they can do what they already want to do.
Every hiring decision is a bet on someone's future contribution. Skills can be taught. Experience can be accumulated. But caring — that deep, personal investment in doing excellent work — is either there or it isn't. Learn to spot it. Hire for it. Protect it when you find it. Build your entire organization around people who give a shit, and watch what becomes possible.