Early Faire hiring mistakes stemmed from falling in love with candidates
Max Rhodes · 20VC: Faire's Max Rhodes on Three Steps To Hire the Best Candidates, Why Every Company Should Have a Strategy Doc and How To Do It & The Art of Referencing; How to Get the Most Out of Every Reference · Feb 18, 2022 · at 23:08
Max Rhodes is the co-founder and CEO of Faire. He discusses early leadership mistakes that led Faire to create a structured hiring framework.
0:00 / 0:33exact quote · 33.1s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“The big mistake that I used to make is I would fall in love with candidates. I still have this problem. But I get enamored with candidates. All of a sudden, I move into confirmation bias mode. I totally ignore any sort of red flags, just focus on all the positives, and I get other people excited about the candidates, so other people also have the same sort of blindness. Almost all of the hiring mistakes that we made in the early days, I think, really stemmed from me getting so excited. Either I skipped over important steps of the process, or I treated important steps of the process as Rubber stamping.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Max Rhodes
Rhodes: Unsold inventory risk is the primary barrier for retail buyers
“The trade show solved like a really fundamental problem for retailers, which is when they are placing an order for a product, they need to know that it's going to sell. If it doesn't sell, they could go out of business. And so there's all this anxiety that's w…”
Rhodes: Keep conducting executive reference checks until you find negative feedback
“And then using references to round that out, and to make sure that, and doing a lot of references, like, for really senior roles, five, six, seven references, one of the pieces of advice I've gotten is keep digging until you find something bad, and then are th…”
Max Rhodes: Interviewing candidates on childhood yields less value than recent work
“But I think the value of that time is a little less than the value of more recent professional experiences.”
Rhodes: Etsy and Bonagora failed at wholesale by ignoring retailer demand
“Moving that online, people had tried it. Like Etsy tried this. There was this other website called Bonagora a while back that tried it. Everyone who tried it Would get a bunch of brands signed up, but then they couldn't get the retailers to order.”