How we hire great people
Our goal is to build an organization with a high density of talent.
We'd rather have a small team of A+ players than a large team of B players. Not every company is designed this way. We are, because small teams move faster. There's less need for coordination, and the end result is usually better because of it.
Everything about the way we hire follows from that one goal.
It's not about the funnel
Most companies hire like a funnel. You open a role, 100 people apply, you pick 20, you talk to 15, you send 5 a take-home, and you hire the 1 who's left standing.
The problem is that the machine only exists to move people through the funnel. You're not hiring the best person. You're hiring whoever survives to the bottom. Lower the bar far enough and the funnel will always produce someone.
That's fine if the goal is to fill a seat. It's not fine if the goal is talent density.
We find the best first
Because we only want to hire the best, we start by finding who the best are.
The mental model is an executive search. When you hire an executive, you don't just open a role and wait for applications to come in. You first figure out the ~20 best people in the world who could actually do the job, and then you go get them.
We try to hire every role that way. The work starts before the role is even posted: who are the best people for this, and how do we reach them?
"The best" means the best for us
This is the part that's easy to get wrong. The best person is not necessarily the most impressive one technically.
The best person is the best for our situation: someone who values what we value, who fits our company size and the shape of our team, and who's right for where we're going, not just where we are today.
A brilliant hire who doesn't fit any of that will slow the team down, not speed it up.
Filling a role is not the job
We still run a real process with a series of stages. But the job of hiring is not to fill a role.
Anyone can fill a role. You just lower your bar and accept the first person who meets the basic criteria. Our job is harder: find the best person for our situation and for the future.
The temptation to just fill the seat is strongest when we're hiring from a place of being burnt out and overworked, exactly when the gap hurts the most. Those are typically the worst hires we can make. They fill the gap in the short term, but not in the long term.
One signal we look for is a spiky moment. Somewhere in the process, there's a point where we learn something new, are presented with an angle we hadn't considered before, or walk away thinking "we absolutely need this person." Without that moment, we pass, even on strong candidates who would do the role well elsewhere. We keep the search open for the bar-raiser.
Great hires are worth the wait
When we look at our history, many of our best hires were people who took multiple months to find. But once we found them, they joined and were self-sufficient from day one. They moved independently and didn't need a lot of hand-holding.
That's the whole point. Hiring the best is slower up front and pays off for years. Hiring to fill a gap is faster up front and costs you later.
When in doubt, we wait for the right person.