Steve Jobs: hiring the best is your most important task

Excerpts from the book In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations with the Visionaries of the Digital World, 1997, published in BusinessWeek in 1998.

What talent do you think you consistently brought to Apple and bring to NeXT and Pixar?

I think that I’ve consistently figured out who really smart people were to hang around with. No major work that I have been involved with has been work that can be done by a single person or two people, or even three or four people. Some people can do one thing magnificently, like Michelangelo, and others make things like semiconductors or build 747 airplanes — that type of work requires legions of people. In order to do things well, that can’t be done by one person, you must find extraordinary people.

The key observation is that, in most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and the best quality is, at most, two-to-one. For example, if you were in New York and compared the best taxi to an average taxi, you might get there 20 percent faster. In terms of computers, the best PC is perhaps 30 percent better than the average PC. There is not that much difference in magnitude. Rarely you find a difference of two-to-one. Pick anything.

But, in the field that I was interested in — originally, hardware design — I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1. Given that, you’re well advised to go after the cream of the cream. That’s what we’ve done. You can then build a team that pursues the A+ players. A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players. That’s what I’ve tried to do.

So you think your talent is in recruiting?
It’s not just recruiting. After recruiting, it’s building an environment that makes people feel they are surrounded by equally talented people and their work is bigger than they are. The feeling that the work will have tremendous influence and is part of a strong, clear vision — all those things. Recruiting usually requires more than you alone can do, so I’ve found that collaborative recruiting and having a culture that recruits the A players is the best way. Any interviewee will speak with at least a dozen people in several areas of this company, not just those in the area that he would work in. That way a lot of your A employees get broad exposure to the company, and — by having a company culture that supports them if they feel strongly enough — the current employees can veto a candidate.

That seems very time-consuming.
Yes, it is. We’ve interviewed people where nine out of ten employees thought the candidate was terrific, one employee really had a problem with the candidate, and therefore we didn’t hire him. The process is very hard, very time-consuming, and can lead to real problems if not managed right. But it’s a very good way, all in all.

Yet, in a typical startup, a manager may not always have the time to spend recruiting other people.
I disagree totally. I think it’s the most important job. Assume you’re by yourself in a startup and you want a partner. You’d take a lot of time finding the partner, right? He would be half of your company. Why should you take any less time finding a third of your company or a fourth of your company or a fifth of your company? When you’re in a startup, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10 percent of the company. So why wouldn’t you take as much time as necessary to find all the A players? If three were not so great, why would you want a company where 30 percent of your people are not so great? A small company depends on great people much more than a big company does.

What I’m Reading - a Tech Talent Syllabus

A Primer on Hiring Technical People

• Hiring a Designer: How to Review Portfolios, Chad Thornton in Design Staff - For when you need to hire a designer, then start reading portfolios and realize you have no idea what they do or if they’re any good.

• How to Hire a Programmer, Jeff Atwood in Coding Horror - For when you need to hire an engineer, then start reading resumes and realize you have no idea what they do or if they’re any good.

• How to Find and Hire Amazing People, Adam Smith’s blog - This is Part 2 of (of at least 4) of the Xobni founder’s generous overview of his recruiting process and corresponding thought process.

• Programmer Nesting Rituals, Joel Spolsky in ERE.net - 10 things other than salary that engineers care about when deciding where to work. Any recruiter, even if they aren’t highly technical, should be able to speak to each of these. I try to have answered most these for candidates by the time we give an offer (whether they asked or not), and that’s served me well.

• Recruiting Programmers To Your Startup, Chris Dixon’s blog - He has a lot of great content on startups, but this post highlights two things that should form the basis for how you recruit engineers: 1. figuring out what’s important to them and how your opportunity satisfies that and 2. establishing a process through which you’ll attract, assess, hire and keep the best people you can find.

Interviewing Engineers

• The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0), Joel Spolsky in Joel on Software -  It’s a long post, but when you think about how much time you’ll spend interviewing engineers over the course of your career, the investment to make sure you’re using all those hours in little conference rooms wisely is worth it. Also, though it’s Version 3.0, the post is from 2006. Great interviewing advice, like great advice in general, is timeless. If you’re not an engineer who interviews engineers, skip to the last paragraph, which is relevant to interviews at any company at any stage:

“If you’re having trouble deciding, there’s a very simple solution. NO HIRE. Just don’t hire people that you aren’t sure about. This is a little nerve wracking the first few times—what if we never find someone good? That’s OK. If your resume and phone-screening process is working, you’ll probably have about 20% hires in the live interview. And when you find the smart, gets-things-done candidate, you’ll know it. If you’re not thrilled with someone, move on.”

• How to Interview an Engineer for your Startup, Tawheed Kader on TK’s Weblog - It’s always interesting to see how other startups do it. In this case I was surprised there wasn’t more emphasis placed on examining (non-pseudo, properly syntax-ed and structured) code during an in-person interview, particularly if the engineer works in a language they don’t know. I assume the author either has other interviewers focusing on coding or they insist on checking a portfolio or GitHub beforehand.

• Top Executive Recruiters Agree There Are Only Three True Job Interview Questions, Forbes Blog - I didn’t want to click on this because the title was so linkbaity, but it’s a good pragmatic approach to assessing candidates. Spoiler alert, the three “true” questions are 1. Can you do the job? 2. Will you love the job? and 3. Can we tolerate working with you?

• Building a world-class team: six mistakes I made early in my career, RethinkDB Blog - I was surprised to find this on a company rather than personal blog, and was impressed by the author’s humility and self-awareness. It covers really easy traps for well-intentioned but inexperienced or insecure hiring managers and interviewers.

Tech Company Culture

• How To Start a Movement, TED Talk by Derek Sivers - This 3 minute video will change the way you view leaders and followers. In a world of entrepreneur hero-worship, this reminds followers of their importance (because, after all, one lone person can’t become a leader until they’ve gained their first follower) and, if you’re the leader, the importance of nurturing the first few followers as equals.

• Fostering a Culture of Dissent, New York Times interviews Yammer CEO David Sacks. If your startup doesn’t have any way to measure performance, accountability or achievements, read this then implement it immediately:

“We just implemented this quarterly process called Morph. So Morph stands for Mission, Objectives, Results, People, and the H is for “How,” as in, “How did you do by the end of the quarter?”

Mission is just a one-sentence description of what’s your mission at the company? What do you have ownership of? And that really gets people to think about, O.K., what is my overall mission here?

Objectives are the top three, maximum five, things that you want to achieve this quarter. Results are about the metrics you’re going to use to measure those objectives. How do we know if we’ve achieved them? People refers to, what changes do we need to make in the organization to achieve this? Do we need to hire people? Do we need to create new teams? Do we need to change the way that a team is defined? And then at the end of the quarter we just ask, “How’d you do?”

• Twitter, The Startup That Wouldn’t Die, Brad Stone in Businessweek - Twitter’s regime change over the past year and half redefined the company right down to its core values. When I worked there, each week Ev and Biz would give a dual presentation on the history of Twitter to new hires, which included a walk-through of the then Core Values (e.g. “Take an Artful Approach” and “Remove Friction.”) Here, Brad Stone writes:

“The entire company eventually joined in and came up with a list of 10 principles, including “Grow our business in a way that makes us proud” and “Innovate through experimentation.” That may sound like the worst kind of corporate offsite banality, but Costolo says it helped. “If you don’t know where you’re going, it seems like any road will take you there,” he says.”

• How Facebook Finds The Best Design Talent and Keeps Them Happy, Fast Co.Design - This is pretty fluffy in the spoon-fed-PR sense, but no one can deny Facebook is scooping up the world’s best designers that you’d never ever think would want to work at Facebook, so Respect.

• Building the Machine that Builds the Business, Skillshare class - Mike Karnjanaprakorn, the CEO of Skillshare, really lives his product. He’s a voracious learner who’s not afraid to divulge the dark arts of entrepreneurship & building a company culture from scratch. I’ve recommended it before, but I enjoy his among countless similar blogs because there’s no vanity or pretense in his writing. He just wants to be helpful to those that could find his experiences helpful. If you’ve met him, you can hear his voice saying the closing line of this post:

“Today, it’s easier than ever to start a company, but building a company will always be as hard as it’s ever been. Wherever you are in your journey, understand that you will always make mistakes. But as long as you learn from them, improve, and stay focused to your mission; great things will almost always happen.”

Self Development (Inspiring commencement speeches are such a guilty pleasure).

• Life and How to Survive It. Adrian Tan, author of The Teenage Textbook, addressing the NTU class of 2008.

“Do not work. Find that pursuit that will energize you, consume you, become an obsession. Each day, you must rise with a restless enthusiasm. If you don’t, you are working.”

• We Are What We Choose. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon addressing the Princeton class of 2010.

“I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, ‘That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn’t already have a good job.’” Ha.

• Life is Long. Drew Faust, Harvard President, addressing the Harvard class of 2008 - I’m a YOLO (you only live once) person but not a “life is short” person so I liked this a lot. I had a paraphrased version of her quote on my blog for a long time.

“if you don’t try to do what you love — whether it is painting or biology or finance; if you don’t pursue what you think will be most meaningful, you will regret it. Life is long. There is always time for Plan B. But don’t begin with it.

I think of this as my parking space theory of career choice, and I have been sharing it with students for decades. Don’t park 20 blocks from your destination because you think you’ll never find a space. Go where you want to be and then circle back to where you have to be.”

one more…

• In Over Your Head - I have no idea who Julien Smith is, though I bet he’s intense but incredible to know. He’s got an unconventionally motivational blog. Read it. The post titles range from “How to Change Your Life: An Epic, 5,000-Word Guide to Getting What You Want” to “The Short and Sweet Guide to Being Fucking Awesome.” If it’s all TL;DR, just skip to the end of every post for gems like: ”We need more awesome people in this world, and I would like you to be one of them.” and “I plan to be unrecognizable in 5 years. I plan to surprise everyone.”