The 90-Day Hiring Question Every Sales Leader Should Ask with Jason Forget

Welcome to the Revenue Builders Podcast, hosted by John McMahon and John Kaplan, brought to you by Force Management. In this segment, we sit down with Jason Forge, president and CRO of Cockroach Labs, whose career spans finance, rev ops, sales leadership, and scaling high growth revenue organizations. The conversation explores a hiring mistake many leaders make, focusing on whether a candidate can do the job without understanding whether they truly want the realities that come with it. Jason shares the interview question he uses to uncover long-term fit, why energy matters more than credentials in certain roles, and how helping candidates honestly assess themselves can prevent costly hiring mistakes. For leaders responsible for building high performing teams, this is a practical lesson in hiring for fit, adaptability, and sustained success. Let's dive in.

Talk to me a little bit about the people you're recruiting when it was you and you have to hire a couple of salespeople at Redis. And then you start to scale and talk to me about the type of people you, you are recruiting then. I'm sure the profile changed.

It did change, you know, in the earlier days you leaned toward, you always want the grit. You always want the people that are willing to do the work because in the early days, it's a different type of grind, but it's a grind. I think it's exponentially more disappointment in the earlier days.

Let's talk to the traits that they have in the early days versus... Once you start to get 50 people, 100 people.

Well, the traits is they're more transactional. They'll end up doing more deals. There's less of these big deal cycles because you're just trying to knock down those early wins. We always tended to look for people that... If someone came from a home that had a family business, really liked those people. People did sports in college or military, just like people that just grinded it out and just had to continue to react and be tactical and find those things. As we grew over... They're resourceful, right? Very resourceful.

I remember I was on the board of this company and I thought this one guy that wanted to be a CRO, put him in the CRO job and called me and said, you know, they don't have like expense reports here. Like, yeah. make an expense report. I mean, later, and he said, you know, they don't even have a laptop. I said, okay, so get online and buy a fucking laptop. I realized, like, within a week, he was just absolutely the wrong person. Even though he did really well in a mid-sized company, he was just awful when it came to a startup.

Yeah, no, you have to be... You have to scrounge. Yeah, you got to put all those things together. You're not going to... get a silver platter of all these things, you know.

I had something here on this.

Yeah.

The big part for me is identifying what's required in the role, like you guys are talking about, but then having, this is why I feel we just miss it too many times. We're not honest about whether or not somebody has the energy to do that. And it has nothing to do with age. It has nothing to do with intellect. It is like, will that give you energy? So a lot of times I'll say to somebody, hey, I like this