Jonathan Lowenhar: evaluation

Transcript context

…I love that. ... most founders are really bad at hiring. They fall prey to all sorts of pretty common human biases. The lazy ones, back to laissez-faire, think it's just gambling like, oh cool, they worked at Meta and Salesforce already, so hire them, just gambling. There was work done by and then codified in a beautiful book. I'm going to make sure I get the names right, Geoffrey Smart and Randy Street. They had a consulting firm that dates back to the mid-nineties. Then they wrote a book in 2007 or 2008 called Who: The A Method for Hiring. We have operationalized that book and then expanded on it 'cause there are some parts of it that we found a little dated, but it's really still as applicable today as it ever was. And I think there are three core mistakes that founders make all the time, that can be really easily rectified. The first one is, you should hire people who have already done the thing you need to have done next. And I know that sounds simple, but founders don't think of hiring that way. They start with a job description. We've been taught that for a long time. Start with the job description. It's a fucking mistake. Start with, it's 12 months later, you hired the person, they started today, 12 months have gone by, you're clinking champagne because of how great it's been. What's changed about the business? What does success look like 12 months later? Document it. And then when you interview people, look for people that have already done that stuff. Second, the notion of does the person in front of you have a history of creating raving fans? They talk in the book about this idea of you being pulled or pushed in your career. If you were an outstanding performer in Job A, it is a high likelihood that in job B, someone associated with you in job A is going to pull you into the next thing and then pull you into the next thing and pull you into the next thing and you'll never do a job search 'cause you were great. And if you see a history of that, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, really attractive candidate. Third, core values matter a lot. Culture is not an accident. Culture at scale is the codification of what matters to a business and the ritualization of living those values. It starts with whoever the founders are and then it will emanate across as long as the founders are super consistent. But that also means you need a methodology for evaluating the next human in front of you on whether they actually represent your values. We think of these interview stages in a way similar to the book, we use slightly different language, but we think that there is a culture interview, there is a functional interview, and there is a technical interview, but they're designed to get at these notions of have they actually done this kind of work before? Have they been pulled or pushed in their career and are they your kind of human? Funny on that last detail actually, [inaudible 00:54:03] at Airbnb, there was actually a core values interview team that was formed around studying what the founders Brian, and Joe, and Nate valued specifically and then they codified them to core values at the business and then there's this team that was a very select handpicked team that at every interview loop interviewed the person for their values.…

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