Concept
Hiring as management
Hiring as management is the view, argued by Julie Zhuo in The Making of a Manager, that choosing who joins is among a manager's most important work, 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 plans the team a year ahead, and the rules follow from that. 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. 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
The lead of a small engineering team at a fintech in Istanbul writes down the two skills the team will need next year and lacks today: watching the system in production, and a second person who can run an incident. He puts two engineers on every interview panel and asks each candidate to walk through one incident they handled, decision by decision. The person he hires is not the most fluent speaker in the pool; she is the one whose account of a bad night had the most detail.
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 people from the team on the panel; they will work with the hire and see what you miss.