Hiring The "Best" Is the Wrong Strategy
The best employees are usually made within an org, not found outside of it
The other day I saw a post on a professional social networking site that said:
“We hiring fast, but we only hire the best.”
I consult with a fair number of companies and seeing this brought up countless memories of business leaders bemoaning the fact that they were trying to hire the “best” person for the job, but had been failing to do so for a long time.
Photo by Ernie Journeys on Unsplash
It’s hard to say what exactly they mean when they say: “the best”, but I think that in this context, "best" generally means "having the most provable domain experience".
Startups (and most companies) are always trying to hire the "best" people, but I think that’s the wrong strategy. I hypothesize that the “best” people are usually developed within an org, not found outside of it, and more importantly, developing humans within the team results in a greater probability of success.
Formula for Success
If you read most stories of successful teams, the story usually goes something like this:
We assembled a team
We tried really hard to solve the problem for a long time
We discovered things no one else knew or were not obvious
We achieved success
I've worked with some incredible humans (SpaceX as one example) and the formula above has always been true in my experience.
Let’s break that story apart into an important formula for success. Here are the main components:
Time - Nearly all stories of success involve working for a long time.
Team Expertise - This seems like it should be obvious, but the keynote here is that time does not bring success without a team of people consistently working during the time above.
Therefore I would say a general formula for success is probably something like:
Success = Time X Team Expertise
This formula is imperfect in so many ways, but hopefully, it is illustrative of the general premise. A perfect team with no time has almost no probability of success. Conversely, an imperfect team with lots of time has a relatively high chance of success.
Hiring
In my experience, hiring one of the "best" (domain experts) people will probably take a minimum of one year and probably more like 1.5 or 2 years to do recruiting, interviewing, convincing, etc. to get them to join a team full time.
In contrast, it’s fairly straightforward to hire excellent human beings that probably do not have domain expertise, but are smart, motivated people, looking to grow within 2-3 months.
So in the time, it took to hire one domain expert, you can easily hire 3-4 people and set them off on an excellent growth trajectory.
Going back to the success formula above, it’s easy to see why waiting to hire domain experts is often a losing strategy compared to making fast hires and developing humans into experts.
Waiting to hire domain experts (hiring time of one year or more) means that over 1 year, the probability of success is zero as there were no humans applying time to the problem.
Success = 0 time X 100 team quality = 0 probability
Contrasting with our second scenario, you’ll find that things suddenly look much more attractive, as the success probability is now greater than zero.
Success = 6 months time X 50 team quality = 300 probability
I know these numbers are silly and without actual meaning, but again, I hope it is illustrative of the point.
Support Structure for Developing Humans
For the sake of argument, I’ve made the strategy above seem fairly simple, but there are some important organizational support elements needed for this approach to succeed.
Developing humans need both time and physiological safety to try things, fail, and learn
It’s unreasonable to assume that inexperienced people are going to be executing at 100% on day one, but that’s ok. Creating both the scheduling space and physiological safety to try things and learn is critical.
Excellent mentorship or advice is likely required for general strategy/coaching.
Of course, it is radically useful if the developing humans have some support structure to look to as they grow. If you as the leader can’t provide that, then I think there are some creative ways to enable your people with mentors quickly and develop them into the leaders you will want in the future.
Ideas
Create an advisory board of domain experts - Often experts aren’t willing to join a new thing as full-time employees but might be willing to help out as an advisor.
Hire consultants for mentorship - Again it’s challenging to convince an expert to join your team full time, but relatively easy to convince them to coach/mentor less experienced members of your team for a few hours a week.
Summary
Hopefully, this was an interesting thought experiment for you.
Just to summarize:
I find that the best employees are usually made within an org, not found outside of it.
Hiring people on a growth trajectory quickly affords a team a better probability of success than waiting to hire the “best”
There are creative ways to bootstrap mentorship and support for less-experienced people other than hiring domain experts onto the team
This article was initially published in my newsletter. Subscribe here if you like this kind of content.