Do They Have “It”?

One of the best parts of Ben Horowitz book “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” is his section on hiring and firing.  In it, he talks about hiring a guy to head up sales for one of his companies. The guy didn’t have a textbook resume.

He wasn’t from a name school.  I recall he was a college grad from Southern Utah.  That sounds like a salsa commercial in the making.  He didn’t have the right background.  But there was something about him that Ben liked and connected with and he hired him.

The guy crushed it.

I think that is one of the toughest things in hiring and firing is figuring out if the person has the right stuff to do the job they are being hired to do.

When people are analyzing other people, they often use heuristics.  They look to de-risk the decision and often they are afraid of what the upper layer of management will think if they fail.  I wrote about The Risky Hire a long time ago and that theory still holds true today.

Those rules of thumb often get in the way and we miss outstanding people that would be better than the ones we are attracted to.  The practice of “Personnel” is the toughest thing to execute on and the thing we don’t necessarily teach well in business school today.