Jason Shah: evaluation

Transcript context

…You touched on hiring, and that's something I wanted to ask you. So, you're in my Talent Collective. You're a company that's hiring, Alchemy, and I was looking at the stats recently, and you're one of the most successful companies at getting candidates to talk to you, and generally I think you're just really good at hiring. So, I'm curious what you can share with folks about hiring. I appreciate that, and I get a lot of value out of meeting some really talented people from the Collective. I think hiring, it's funny, it reminds me of sort of push back in a sense of what you call it has such an impact on how people think about it. It's hiring, recruiting, but if people reframe it as the people you are going to work with every day or the people who make the company what it is, it shifts the mindset. It's like how is that not the most important thing to be thinking about as a leader or as a founder. A lot of people have benchmarks. I think maybe on the Google podcast I talk about 30%, 40% of a founder's time maybe spent on recruiting because I think deep down everybody understands that that's incredibly valuable. I think that for me personally, I was reflecting ahead of the podcast on how I approach things now after different stages of hiring, and for context, for what it's worth, I've been at the zero person startup. It's just me and I'm trying to convince some Google engineer to come join us which is incredibly hard and has a low hit rate, to a place like Amazon or Airbnb where you have a large world-class recruiting organization that is effectively doing sourcing for you and setting up interviews and such things like this, and there's formal calibrations and interview panels, to a place like Alchemy where it's very sort of scrappy. We need to figure out who we even want to hire. The founders still meet with every candidate. It's a really different environment. So, this is kind of the spectrum that I've seen, and I was reflecting what do I think works the best, and I like to think of it in very similar motions to a business where I think there is a marketing aspect to it, there was a sales aspect, and there is a product aspect to it. What I mean by that is that on a marketing level, I think what has a person heard about your company. Do they know anybody who works there? Do they read your LinkedIn post about things and already know that you're a known quantity before they even step in the door to interview? Are they even willing to interview based on what they know about the company? And so, I think that the marketing aspect in it, and I mean it's sort of lower case marketing in this sense of course because I think a hard sell of any sort or anything that's not authentic is probably going to fail ultimately, but it's about developing a really positive kind of brand and reputation for a company but also as an individual. And then if you pass that threshold, I feel like there's a sort of a sales process, and we were talking about how bad of a salesperson I am, for example, because I didn't listen to people's pain points and understand the one or two things that were most important to them. I think similarly in this context, if they're an engineer, do they want to work in a world-class engineering organization? points and understand the one or two things that were most important to them. I think similarly in this context, if they're an engineer, do they want to work in a world-class engineering organization? If they're a product person or they're just really excited about crypto and they want to find a way in, a place like Alchemy's the best place for them to learn that is how to think about it, and it's not about misdirecting on or matching whatever they say, but it's about really understanding who they are and what motivates them and what they're excited about because I'm as concerned about the kind of post-hiring step as I am the pre-hiring and want them to work out and be happy and be effective. And then lastly, I think there's a product angle to it that not a lot of people think about or talk about a lot because I think the product, it's one of those rare cases where job descriptions are almost like product specs, right? They're here's what the responsibilities are, here's what we need you to do, here's the qualifications we're looking for. And what's really funny about that is that product is very iterative, but somehow we just write a job description, and then it's bait, it's done, it's posted, and nobody thinks about it again until the person's hired and then they take it down. I think taking a product mindset where I meet people all the time now where I don't really know exactly what role they're necessarily going to fill, I'm not really sure about exactly their seniority, maybe they don't have a lot of experience, but maybe they would just totally be a rockstar on our product team. And looking at a product that we can mold flexibly and think of the same way if at Airbnb, if we were going to build Airbnb Plus, if we just kind of came back to the Amazon working backwards and just wrote a document and it was over, that's one thing, but we didn't do that, right? We went and actually built rooms and homes that were supposed to be Airbnb Plus, and then we iterate on it and we changed the pillows and we changed the entrance and we changed the scent that you feel when you walk in. We coach host and learned about that. So, I think a product mindset on hiring and iterating on it based on the candidates you're meeting, the needs of the business. So this kind of marketing, sales, product combination has been what I've found to be really effective at getting people excited, understanding who they are and what they need, and then crafting a role that actually makes the person successful, rather than just checks a box in your recruiting software as some new headcount that was hired.…

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