# Screening for ego in the hiring process

- **Episode:** [213](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/213.md) (2025-07-10)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** hiring, ego, screening
- **Time:** 31:42–35:08 (start 1902s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/213?t=1902](https://truthliesandwork.com/213?t=1902)

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[31:42] Al Elliott: In this kind of industry where you do have experts, sort of top 1% of people in the world, do you find that some of them have an ego to match?
[31:49] Steve Roest: Absolutely. And we screen for that. So tell me more about that. Well, so in any area where technical competence is valued and where technical competence is achieved through qualifications, over time, particularly in academia, the value system is not necessarily meritocratic. And the reward structure that they've been used to does not necessarily incentivize collaboration, team effort, working towards a singular goal at the expense of personal credit, personal ego. And so if you think about how the academic structure works, it's very much around How many times have you been published? How many times have you been cited? What research money have you brought in? It's very— the process is very much around, I'm right, you're wrong, in a sense. Even when you submit a paper for a peer-reviewed journal and they respond, you respond back sort of arguing your case. And that's quite hard for people to sort of break free of, to understand that actually, while you may be right and you may have won this argument, there's still another 999 problems that we're trying to solve today that aren't related. And actually, by digging in over there, you've created this weird kind of, this sort of weird atmosphere that actually works against the principle of everyone pulling together and everyone working towards a team goal or a company goal. So actually within those highly technical areas, we try and screen for people that are more interested and motivated by achieving team goals, goals that are above themselves as opposed to individual accolades. Obviously, the fact that you are the lead scientist at one of the UK, at PocDoc, which is one of the UK's fastest growing health tech companies, the Healthy Heart Check that you've built has scaled across the high street and is finding thousands of at-risk patients every month. That's incredible for your CV. And we've published lots of academic papers and you're listed on the academic paper, for example, things like that. But at the end of the day, nobody, including myself, is bigger than the company. Nobody is bigger than the mission. That is what matters. And trying to screen for that, I'm not saying we always got it right, particularly not in the early stages, but that's really what you're looking for
[34:23] Al Elliott: Now, I'm not from an academic background, but my brother is. He was a professor at a UK university for decades. I learned that academic goals are very different to business goals. For example, publishing papers and winning arguments is very different from building products collaboratively
[34:37] Leanne Elliott: And the research tells us that individual brilliance doesn't automatically translate to team performance. In fact, teams with moderate individual talent but high collaboration often outperform teams of superstars
[34:48] Al Elliott: So how do you actually identify whether superstars can work as team players in the interview process? Steve mentioned they have a couple of specific techniques exactly for this. Can you give me, without giving away your secret questions for your interview process, but just give maybe me and the listeners an idea of what sort of things you would be asking to uncover whether this person is centered about them or centered about the mission?