Hiring

“I just think AI is going to be way better at that than people. I think it's going to be, like, dramatically better at that, and I'm surprised that people aren't Using, like, kind of the training data of your existing team to inform the next hire.”

“Now, if you're hiring right people, you don't need to obviously give them directions. You just give them a problem statement. Sometimes they find the problem statement. You enable them in terms of how do you know, They can get the work done. That is my second …”

“So I found that to be very true in hiring where, you know, people who just, you know, act like they have, they, you know, they just have to fight for their life to go hire this team by themselves as if there was no recruiting support and they're just really de…”

“I always say if, like, the person you were gonna hire, if you ask them, like, tell me what happened in your last job. Like, why did you leave? Why did you choose to move on? If they start going negative, the company was terrible, the boss was awful, everything…”

“People aren't, there are some example, some extreme examples, but it's not that people are getting fired today or their jobs are being automated today. It's that the hiring's slowing.”

“If you thought of it as a CapEx decision, if you're going to hire someone for a hundred grand, right, a year, and you think the, you know, discount the value of that, like, you know, it's a million dollar investment that you're making in that person.”

“So in business, unlike sports, we don't fall to the levels we practice. We fall to the level of those we hire.”

“And when you stop hiring, you have higher output because all of your time, like every employee is in the J curve, they actually take time before they start being productive.”

“We only hire for a role if we're actually underwater for that function.”

“What happens when you have people that join a company and in reality, you didn't really need them. They will go out and manufacture some other thing that they should go work on. They should, they will go out and figure out something else to work on. And realis…”

“I will get one out of every four hires wrong. And if you work with that constraint, you can be smart about it. So wherever possible, I love to have people contract or do something for a couple of months, because you can always tell after you start working with…”

“It's not, you're not investing in the AI. You're investing in like a new way or a new approach to hiring, which happens to leverage AI. And I think there is an important distinction there.”

“One of the biggest mistakes that founders make is they hire to discover revenue. What you need to do is hire to scale revenue because it's your responsibility to discover it.”

“He says an empty seat. Is less damaging than a poor fit.”

“I don't think that hiring more Is always the answer to growing faster. And actually I think sometimes it's the opposite. I've seen too many times, you know, like you hire too quickly, you hire the wrong people. You can't keep like a high level, you know, like …”

“One thing that I think would have helped me is like after an interview, asking myself, do I see myself working for 10 years with that person? Like, do I like their energy or like this kind of things? I think it's super important. And sometimes it's not even th…”

“Hiring is really freaking hard. Like it is the one area where I think most early stage founders get most wrong.”

“In hiring, for example, I would certainly say that it is easier to teach somebody the tools or the domain and the, you know, the space that you work in than it is to teach taste.”

“If it's a really bad hire, you will know, like, within a few weeks.”

“College admissions and hiring is not just gonna go for the high GPA and the full resume of extracurricular activities. They're gonna go for signs of being a free range kid. They're going to go for signs that you traveled alone, you traveled on your own for thr…”

“Invest in strength, not lack of weakness.”

“It's always your fault when someone doesn't work out... It's you didn't do the work. You didn't figure out if they were the right fit. They never know. You can never know enough about a company before you join. It's impossible.”

“It is uncomfortable to hire people that are better than you. Your survival brain kicks in at first, and you worry about your job. You worry that these people won't learn from you. You question your value. In fact, all of these things, all of these worries, are…”

“I've found, you know, a weird, weird rule that I found is that a lot of the best hires that I've had, have had big failure stories that they've worked through and learned from.”

“You'll hear this sometimes, if you come across a really good person, then just hire them, but when you're a small company, you do tend to have very specific needs, and there is less room for that.”

“Like a lot of engineering managers are spending half their time or more hiring like 18 months ago, and now they're doing like two interviews a month or less, maybe zero interviews a month.”

“I only want to hire people that make me feel like I'm Michael. I'm the Michael Scott of the office. That's actually how it should feel when you're doing it right.”

“I think we focus so much on the hiring And nobody talks about the firing process, and that's where everything gets messed up, like, half the time.”

“I rather have the people that have the There's incredible strengths in the weaknesses than the people that are okay in just certain areas. Those tend to be, if you manage them adequately, those are much more powerful type of hires.”

“When you're hiring somebody, if you're ever doing a pros and cons list, that tells, that means you shouldn't hire them. Immediately.”

“I think that internal drive is something you can't teach. And I'm very, you know, perhaps that goes against current wisdom. I do think that as long as someone has that internal hunger and that internal drive, you know, there was a, there's an old saying that y…”

“People think of like the talent density of your company as dependent on hiring. And that's obviously true. It's an important part of the ecosystem and the first part, but it's equally dependent on retention and performance management.”

“We want them to follow instructions first, because if you can't follow instructions, then your creativity doesn't matter. Right? Because there's a hierarchy. At some point, you're going to have to listen to what someone else says.”

“My biggest thing I say with all time is when you're hiring, you pick the people, but they pick when.”

“So we actually have a written screen that we do with folks where it's just a Google doc that has like a dozen or so biographical questions that we allow people to answer. And you'd be shocked like the way that, how well it screens people like, you know, 50% of…”

“Shopify hires through ah, we talk about just your life story a lot, and I feel like we can find a lot of predictive artifacts in, in a life story about which kind of type of pursuit you're on.”

“So if you're giving out equity of your company, it's a one way door. You can't get it back. You know, oftentimes if you're hiring someone, it can be a two way door. If it doesn't work out, you part ways.”

“If you don't hire the right people, if you hired kind of the wrong people, or if you got into a place where the culture in the company is kind of broken, those two things are very hard to fix. Most other things you can fix. You can rewrite your product, you ca…”

“Hiring is not something you can delegate. It's your job as the CEO until you're a thousand employees.”

“We know that hiring takes time, knowing that you're very likely to have the, you know, revenue that you need to support that person. Ahead of time. Absolutely. Getting ahead of hiring is, is strategic.”

“So I think 80% of this is really solved by hiring. And the other 20% is solved by making sure we don't miss out on opportunities that are not directly staring us at the face.”

“As somebody who's run large recruiting organizations that have hired thousands and thousands of people, yeah, I would say that the chances that you're gonna find somebody who's extraordinary in a position is about one in five.”

“When you put math and science to the problem of hiring, it tells you that diverse people do jobs that are way different than you might think as a human doing Search with all of our unconscious and conscious bias.”

“And this is an advice that I'm giving to other entrepreneurs. Hire first, grow after.”

“The people who don't have something great to walk away are probably the people you don't want.”

“If you're going to hire somebody with bad values, don't be hiring somebody smart. Hire them stupid and slow, because they will do less damage.”

“I don't know if I believe there's ever a time to pour fuel on people. I believe there's time to pour fuel on marketing or business development or partnerships or different distribution channels, but I actually think that's very different from people. So I thin…”

“Hiring is a solution to a problem. The more hiring you do means the bigger problems you have. And so it means you couldn't solve them in a more creative and scalable way.”

“You need to hire the person who is great At the thing you need him to be great at. The thing you need her to be great at. And may have some real other issues.”

“If you raise around prematurely, if you raise like ten million dollars before you've kind of gone through that pain, now you're under pressure to hire people, and you might not have a clear sense of exactly who you need, because every, you know, you keep using…”