Anyone can write a great resume right now. Polished bullets, sharp verbs, metrics that sound impressive. That used to tell you something real about a candidate. These days it mostly tells you they have a good AI.
So the resume can't be your filter anymore. That job falls to the interview, and most people still wing it.
I've run phone screens at companies going from zero to one million in revenue, one to ten million, ten to fifty million, fifty to a hundred million, and up into the hundreds of millions and beyond. Here's the one test that holds up at every stage: can this person talk about one or two of their own accomplishments in real depth. Not the highlight reel. The actual how. What they tried first, what broke, why they made the call they made.
That's where the resume stops and the person starts.
The magic is never in your first question. It's in the follow up. "Walk me through that" gets you a rehearsed answer. "Why that approach over the other one" gets you the real one, because there's nowhere left to hide if they didn't actually do the work.
The stage of the company changes constantly. What never changes is that the best hires share the same trait: a genuine growth mindset, the instinct to keep learning instead of defending what they already know. You can't find that on a resume. You can only hear it in how someone talks about what they've actually done.