Joshua March on the Who Method, Yellow Flags, and Why Most Interview Questions Are Useless

In our “We Have Questions” series, we talk to CEOs, leaders, and professionals who are exceptionally good at hiring, or have strong opinions about how it should be done.

This installment: Joshua March, founder and CEO of Veritus Agent (YC S25), an AI agent platform for the consumer lending industry. He’s built companies from zero to 100 people, including Conversocial, which he sold to Verint, and a16z-backed SciFi Foods, and he’s been interviewing candidates for over 20 years. His conclusion about most of what happens in an interview room? Almost completely useless.

Stop Asking Generic Questions. Start Asking About Their Actual Career.

Josh has interviewed hundreds of people, possibly a thousand. For years he ran the standard playbook: situational questions, hypotheticals, “tell me about a time when.” It didn’t work.

“I tried to do the kind of typical interview questions and I always came away feeling like I was terrible at interviewing and had no actual way of assessing people outside of getting them to do some real work.”

So he stopped. What changed everything was the Who method, from Geoff Smart and Randy Street’s book Who. The technique is deceptively simple: instead of hypotheticals, you walk through the candidate’s actual career, job by job, asking the same questions for each role. What were you hired to do? What were the high points? The low points? Why did you leave?

“I come away feeling a much greater sense that I understand this person’s strengths and weaknesses and if they’d be suitable for the role.”

It can run long, sometimes multiple hours for a full work history. Josh typically focuses on the last five jobs. What he gets out of it is a real picture of how this person works, not just how they talk about working.

The Question Inside the Question

The Who interview isn’t just a chronological walk through a resume. It’s a system for creating honesty in real time.

For every job, Josh asks who the candidate’s manager was, writes down the name, and then asks: “When I reach out to John Smith, what do you think he’ll say were your strengths and weaknesses at that time?”

The Who book calls this the Threat of Reference Check. It works.

“You get so much more honesty when you’ve written down the manager’s name and say you’re going to reach out to them.”

It’s not a gotcha. It’s a mirror. Candidates who’ve been accurate about their own performance don’t blink. Those who’ve been embellishing suddenly get a lot more candid.

“Why did you leave?” is just as revealing, and he asks it for every role.

“The best people are like, ‘Well, my manager went to a new company and asked me to join him.’ It’s a good sign when people are being hired by their managers multiple times.”

Leaving for opportunity is one thing. Getting quietly managed out is another. The pattern across five jobs tells a story no single answer can fake.

Bring a Pessimist

Josh doesn’t run the Who interview alone. He does it with his COO, who he describes, with genuine appreciation, as “extremely pessimistic and judgmental, the opposite of me.”

“She’s more likely to pick up on red flags or amber flags than I am. We can riff off each other, asking follow-up questions, and swap notes on what we observe.”

The pairing is deliberate. Founders tend to be optimists. They have to be. But optimism in an interview is a liability: you overlook the niggly things, explain them away, tell yourself the person will grow into the role. Having someone in the room who’s wired differently isn’t a nice check. It’s the point.

Yellow Flags Don’t Stay Yellow

One of Josh’s hard-won rules: trust your doubts.

“People are on their best behavior in interviews. Anytime we’ve interviewed someone where we thought they were great but there were some yellow flags, almost every time those little yellow flags end up being red flags down the road.”

Don’t talk yourself out of a concern because someone interviewed well. Go deeper on it. “Really think through: if this behavior is amplified 10x, what will the impact be?”

Most hiring processes are built to generate enthusiasm, each round adding momentum toward a yes. Josh’s is built to stay skeptical.

“It’s got to be green across the board in the interview. If there are those niggly little things, really go deep into those and have other people probe those before you make a decision.”

References Are Where You Verify, Not Discover

Once Josh is excited about someone, references are the verification layer. And he runs them differently than most.

He doesn’t call whoever the candidate offers up. He goes back to the managers’ names he wrote down during the interview, and he uses the interview itself as the script.

“Thanks for introducing me to your peer Bob, but I actually want to speak to John Smith, your manager.”

When John Smith picks up: “In the interview, he said this is what you would think were his strengths and weaknesses at that time. Do you agree with that?”

If the candidate was self-aware and honest, the reference confirms it. If not, the gap shows up fast.

He also asks what kinds of work the person prefers (softer than asking what they’re bad at), what kinds of people they need around them to succeed (a back door to weaknesses), and for a ranking: top 25%, top 10%, top 5%, top 1%?

“You’re always looking for minimum top 10%. A lot of people will say top 25% for someone who’s not very good.”

For Executives: Make Them Do the Work

For senior hires, Josh adds one more filter: a 30-60-90 day presentation. Once he’s excited about a candidate, he asks them to come back with a plan for their first three months.

“Good people are going to really dig in and ask a ton of questions, want to speak to other people on the team, want real data, and actually do some real work around it.”

It’s revealing in two directions. It shows how seriously the candidate takes the role. And it gives Josh a live chance to give feedback and watch how they respond.

“I want to see how people react to getting actual feedback live in a meeting. Are they responsive and excited to work on it, or are they defensive and upset?”

“I found some executives who talked a really good game, but when you actually got them to make a presentation talking about what they were going to do, things could quickly fall apart.”

It’s Not a Democracy

Josh has watched companies let hiring become a committee vote. He thinks that’s a mistake.

“It’s not a democracy; it’s not a vote. There is a hiring manager who needs to listen and take input, and if I veto it, I veto it. I don’t want the lowest common denominator.”

At a previous company, he and his co-founder hired a head of R&D the whole team said no to: too grumpy, too hard-pushing. They hired them anyway. The person was great.

Consensus hiring sounds safer. It often just means you end up with whoever offends nobody, which is not the same as whoever would be best.

Wrapping Up

After 20 years and close to a thousand interviews, Josh’s approach is simple to say and hard to do: walk through the real career instead of hypotheticals, write down the managers’ names and tell the candidate you’ll call them, treat yellow flags as red, make senior candidates do real work, and use references to test the picture rather than build it.

The meta-lesson is that he has a system. He knows what he’s looking for, how to structure the conversation to find it, and how to pressure-test his own instincts before pulling the trigger.

Most hiring processes generate a feeling of confidence. Josh’s is designed to earn it.

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