Rippling's Executive Hiring Playbook: Test for the Job, Not the Pedigree
The News
Writing in ERE, Julia Aybin, head of talent at Rippling, details the framework the company developed after years of triple-digit growth revealed that promoted ICs often couldn't scale into leadership. The process has two pre-interview filters: whether candidates have 'seen great' (been part of a genuinely high-performing team, not just a brand name) and whether they've stayed through hard moments. The interview itself is deliberately un-senior: VP candidates complete the same case-study assessment as individual contributors, presenting a working prototype to a live panel of three. Over 30 VP-level candidates have reached the final round and failed — not for lack of talent, but because they'd lost hands-on capability. Only 20% of candidates make it to references. The reference process requires five names, and includes a specific stack-ranking question: 'If you were to stack-rank them against others you've seen in similar roles, where do they land?' The target answer is 'top 2–5%.' Before an offer is extended, Rippling does an 'anti-sell' — levelling with the candidate about the worst aspects of the role.
Why It Matters
This is one of the most candid accounts of executive hiring process design from a high-growth company in recent memory. The core insight — that executive interviews should test the actual work, not the candidate's ability to discuss vision — challenges a widespread practice in TA: treating senior hiring as a qualitative conversation and junior hiring as a skills test. If your VP candidates never face a case study, you're selecting for presentation skills, not execution ability. The 'anti-sell' is equally important: it's a cheap, effective filter that saves organisations from hires who look right on paper but can't tolerate the actual environment.
Taking Action
All action is situated in your corporate context. These are starting points, not prescriptions — choose what fits.
Connect
Who to talk with in your enterprise
Your executive search lead: Discuss whether your senior hiring process includes any form of work-sample assessment. If your VP interviews are entirely conversational, ask what signal you're actually collecting beyond charisma and narrative construction. Your head of talent acquisition: Review your reference-checking process against Rippling's stack-ranking question. If you're asking 'tell me about them,' you're getting references, not assessments.
Inspect
What to take a closer look at
Review your last three executive hires. For each, ask: did they complete any form of work-sample assessment or case study before the offer? If not, what evidence did you actually have that they could do the job — as opposed to evidence that they'd done a similar job somewhere else?
Reflect
What to think about more deeply
If your executive interview process wouldn't pass your own bar for a mid-level individual contributor, what exactly are you optimising for at the top?