• Scale AI’s interim CEO Jason Droege said he prioritizes curiosity, collaboration, and leadership in hires.
• Droege said he emphasizes adaptability over experience for most roles.
• Tech leaders like LinkedIn’s CEO echo the value of initiative and adaptability over experience.

One AI executive’s interview checklist has three simple boxes.

“I have to interview across all kinds of expertises,” Scale AI’s interim CEO Jason Droege said on an episode of “Lenny’s” podcast released on Thursday. “I can’t be an expert in everything, and so I reduce it down to just three things.”

Scale helps tech companies like Meta, OpenAI, and xAI improve their chatbots by doing tasks like rewriting bots’ responses. Droege took on the role of Scale’s interim CEO in June, after cofounder and CEO Alexandr Wang left the startup to join Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. Droege was the vice president of Uber Eats and a venture partner at Benchmark before he joined Scale in 2024 as chief strategy officer.

He said that the first trait he looks for is if someone is a “curious problem solver” and if they can express that verbally.

Droege said his second criterion was humble collaboration. He gave an example from his time building the Uber Eats management team.

“Whenever I would hire people, I was trying to compose almost like an organism of strengths and then minimize the conflicts,” he said.

Lastly, he said he looks for people who are good leaders.

“If you just do those three things, I think you have a pretty high chance of success at least in an organization,” he said. “The world’s changing, right? So you do need people that are adaptable. So all the experience is not necessarily one-to-one relevant.”

But experience is important for some expert roles, Droege said.

“For certain roles, you absolutely need the right experience in this current market,” he said. “You see this with researchers, because the market’s moving so fast, you don’t have time to train up some people.”

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Droege joins several tech executives who say that experience is no longer the factor they most value, especially with AI in the mix.

Last week, Albert Cheng, the former head of product at Duolingo and Grammarly, said that top performers were not always the ones with vast experience.

“I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy,” Cheng said. “They cared about the mission, but they didn’t necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter.”

Ryan Roslansky, the CEO of LinkedIn, said that initiative and adaptability will be more valuable in the future as companies incorporate AI in the workplace.

“My guess is that the future of work belongs not anymore to the people that have the fanciest degrees or went to the best colleges, but to the people who are adaptable, forward thinking, ready to learn, and ready to embrace these tools,” Roslansky said at a fireside chat at the company’s office last week.