The Art of Hiring
This is the Chapter 20 of my e-book Silicon Valley for Foreigners, that can be downloaded for free on www.siliconvalleybook.com or purchased for $2.99 on the iBookStore and Kindle. A new chapter will be posted on this blog every week.
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Steve Jobs used to say that “A players hire A players; B players hire C players; and C players hire D players. It doesn’t take long to get to Z players. This trickle-down effect causes bozo explosions in companies.”
The two main advantages startups have over large companies are efficiency and speed. As startups grow and mature, the hiring process becomes essential for their survival. If founders do not hire A players, startups lose competitiveness and might even go bankrupt.
For that reason alone, Silicon Valley companies adopted a policy of “slow to hire, fast to fire” where prospective employees’ curriculum and qualifications are just the starting point. As a talent centric ecosystem, Silicon Valley startups pay ultimate attention to the quality of their people.
If you are on the entrepreneur side, hiring in Silicon Valley is more art than math. Founders need to be charismatic and go to great lengths to convince top engineers, product managers, and designers to join their team. People need to believe in the founders’ reputation. It helps if they worked together at another company or have known each other for years. If a potential employee does not know the founders, he or she relies on recommendations from friends or colleagues who know them.
The next step would be to assess the founders’ vision and culture for the company they are applying for. Is what they are trying to build feasible, disruptive or cool? Could it be a billion-dollar company one day? Are the founders nice or a bunch of sociopaths? Are other hires happy? Do they give autonomy to the team or are they control freaks? Do they treat minorities with respect? Different people look for different cultural traits that may appease their purpose.
Professionals who are willing to leave their jobs at a large company in order to work for a tiny startup generally take a huge salary cut in exchange for stock options. Different from many other parts of the world, it is well appreciated by the Silicon Valley community when employees prefer shares over cash. It is a sign of commitment. The sooner you join a startup, the riskier it is and, therefore, the higher is your stock package (which can be worth millions in a few years).
If you want to apply for a job at a startup or large company, be prepared for an interview process that may take months and involve up to ten interviewers inside the organization. Relationships with company employees may help to get your foot in the door, but they do not guarantee you will be hired.
The larger the company, the more interviews the candidates will face. They will be grilled by founders, future bosses, and subordinates who will evaluate not only their competences for the position but also their cultural fit. If anyone in the team has any second thoughts, the trigger is not pulled. This is a brutal process, more thorough than anything I have seen in other countries.
Usually, in many ecosystems outside Silicon Valley, large companies or even startups rely on external headhunters for screening prospective employees. I had the chance to speak to many headhunters over the years and I tend to believe the process is outdated, slow, and very inefficient.
Headhunters do not know the company’s business intricacies very well and, in the tech industry, they also happen to not have the experience or the advanced expertise to comprehend the qualifications of the best candidates for technical jobs. I doubt a regular headhunter is able to discern good from bad candidates in hairy subjects such as cloud computing, machine learning, robotics or even basic app KPIs.
Comparing the headhunting model with the Silicon Valley model, I am highly biased for the latter. In my opinion, entrepreneurs must be involved in the majority of hires to keep the company’s culture tight and to make sure A players are fulfilling all the top positions. Large companies may survive with C or D players, but startups will definitively die if they do not hire the best.
