Concept
Hiring as management
Hiring as management is Julie Zhuo's argument that hiring is the highest-leverage work a manager does, because one hire raises or lowers everyone's output for years. Hire for the team you need in a year, judge what candidates have actually done, and involve the team.
The arithmetic is Grove's leverage at its highest. Ten hours spent interviewing to avoid one bad hire saves the hundreds of hours that hire would have cost the team; a great hire makes everyone around them better for years. Zhuo's rules follow. Know what the team needs in a year, not the gap this week, and write it down before the first interview. Interview for what the person has done, in detail, rather than how they talk about themselves; the story of a specific project, with the decisions and the mistakes, tells more than any answer to a hypothetical. Involve the team, because they will work with the person and they see what the manager does not. And hold a high bar with one test: would you be excited to work for this person one day? A team is the sum of its hires, and the manager who treats hiring as a chore between real work has the leverage backwards.
A real-life example
Ege's team needs two skills next year that it lacks, observability and a second person who can run incidents. He writes both down before opening the role, has two engineers on every panel, and asks each candidate to walk through one incident they handled, decision by decision. The hire he makes is not the best talker in the pool.
How to use it
- 1Write what the team needs in a year before opening the role, and interview against that.
- 2Ask for one real project in detail, decisions and mistakes included.
- 3Put the team on the panel, and apply the one test: would you work for this person?