Kevin Yien: prediction

Transcript context

…I love that. Oh my god, that puts all this pressure on your score, which is great. So that's actually a segue talking about hiring. There's a couple more tactics that I've seen you be really good at. So one is just hiring in general. You have a lot of interesting approaches to hiring, including this idea of a unsell email where you try to convince someone not to join your company. Talk about that and why you think that's effective and then anything else along the lines of hiring you've learned. I'll say the idea of the unsell email came from a place of failure, which is at Square I had shifted into a position where I had to hire a lot of people really quickly. And through that, as a fairly new hiring manager, you're like, "All right, great. I've been told the goal is to hire fast." Okay, you give me a metric, you're going to go after it. So you do your best to get as many people in the door as possible. When you're talking to your recruiting partner, they're incentivized to increase pass through rates, offer to close rates, all these other things, and so they're like, "Yeah, this person's really good." And you listen. "Yeah, they are pretty good, aren't they?" Even though there's a sneaking suspicion that maybe they're not the right fit, but you move forward anyways. So fast-forward, there's a few folks I bring on, and within six months they come to me and they're like, "This is not at all what I thought I was going to do. This is not the environment I thought I was going to walk into. You didn't warn me about this, that and the other. I feel terrible. How do I prevent this?" And the reason it's bad is not just because they feel surprised, but because then, either one, they decide to leave, two, they're not performing because it's not the right role or environment for them, or three, maybe the company is still good, but that role isn't. And so they immediately try to do internal mobility or something to another team, which then leaves you with the same hole. So all of those bad outcomes. [inaudible 00:48:37] "How do I prevent this?" Well, I just got to front load all the gnarly stuff they're going to find out in their first six months. And so the practice I started developing is you go through the whole interview process. During that period, you're collecting all these little concerns, fears, anxieties that they're not explicitly saying, but they're definitely hinting at. You got to be pretty honest with yourself about which ones are real. But then when you get to offer stage, I send an email with no more than eight bullet points and I say all the terrible things that are probably going to reinforce their fears. I'm pretty candid about, "This is what it's like here." Maybe one example would be, "Hey, I'm a parent and I'm worried about work-life balance." Maybe they don't say that explicitly in the interview process, but you get a feeling for it. And I get that as a parent too. So if I'm at a startup, I'll be really clear and I'll say, "You know what? We are a series A startup. We are pushing really hard at product-market fit. The expectation here is going to be that you're online at 10:00, that you can occasionally hop on a meeting on a Saturday or Sunday." And if you can tell them that upfront and they can read that whole email and still be equally excited to join, you find yourself an A+ hire. But if they read that and they're like," I don't know anymore," it's way better to say, "Great, this is not a good fit. whole email and still be equally excited to join, you find yourself an A+ hire. But if they read that and they're like," I don't know anymore," it's way better to say, "Great, this is not a good fit. Let's go our separate ways" than have them leave after six months. When I first instituted this, I lost 30% of candidates at offer stage.…

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