Our team has grown, and one of my top priorities is hiring well. Good hiring. While flying from Bangalore to Kolkata for a two-week family break, a line from a recent Naval podcast kept lingering: "You'll never hire anyone better than yourself."
This statement is true, and we don't realise how much. Any good manager likes to believe they're an A-player, and A-players hire A-players while B-players hire C-players, right? Well, better said than done.
This line, "you'll never hire anyone better than you", could mean a lot of things. It may make you feel like you're the best the organisation can have, and it can also mean that you're incapable of hiring someone better.
By the way, Naval means it as a founder's problem because when the company is young, nobody is better than you. You're the best pitch out there. Anyway, here are some condensed thoughts I'd share with my team as we hire ahead.
On hiring
I strongly believe that when you're with a candidate, you're still that offer and the pitch. The candidate isn't trying to figure out how good the company is. If they're smart, they would've done the homework and already know about the company and what we do. So don't waste thirty minutes giving a company overview.
The smart candidate is trying to picture who they'd become in the next two years. And they're usually looking at you. How you turned out, your journey, and most importantly, the questions you ask.
These questions also start with the job description you wrote. It's normal for folks to write a JD that's a couple of notches above what they had actually experienced at work. The problem is that either no one truly qualifies, or even if someone does, the interviewer doesn't know how to benchmark that levelled-up quality. So, see the levelled-up description in person before you put it in the job description.
Also, don't sell the role or the glamour. Sell the actual problem you're facing. I sold a dysfunctional team recently to someone who then chose to join us to fix it. See, a company where everything's sorted has nothing to offer to someone good.
Unlike today, when you talk about the company and the product for a long time, you talk about generic things, over coffee meet-ups, and ask about their professional history; just get to the meat immediately. Cut most of the crap, and you have a better chance of hiring someone.
On growing them
The first thing to understand here is that you can't grow them. You can't be a teacher if you haven't done the exact same thing enough to coach them. So your best bet is to allocate them things.
Beyond what you're actually capable of evaluating in their specific job, you get stuck because you don't understand the nuances. You wouldn't know if what they are doing is good, average, or bad. So this gap forces you to praise their work. If you end up just praising them, it really means nothing. They usually know they're good at their job.
If you keep yourself as the bottleneck for their professional development, they're capped by your inability. If you try to bridge the gap with an external resource, their loyalty attaches to the mentor and not you. So the best thing you can do is keep giving them difficult challenges. This becomes your moat in the team. And it's scarce. Most orgs do not have as many difficult problems as they claim.
They will find something challenging if the method to solving the problem isn't known, failing to solve the problem costs something real, and lastly, they own the decision, not a recommendation you made.
You get the gist. If you focus on building great things and through the great people you hired, your chances of growing them increase.
On keeping them
When you have a high performer on your team, the best thing you can do is keep giving them difficult problem statements and not get in their way.
Second, they didn't join for you; they joined for a forecast of their future self in the environment you'll help provide. The retention we know of is actually their forecast still holding true.
If you think about it, if great folks joined you because they found a difficult problem statement, that's what will keep them as well - more difficult and challenging problem statements. If you don't have those left, retention will be difficult. So keep doing what's expected of you as a leader; keep asking whether you'll have more difficulty next year than you do now.
Third, watch for changes in their behaviour. If they've stopped arguing with you or stopped asking you for things, it's a sign. Scheduling a 1v1 to fix that won't change it either. Money isn't always the reason, but if you underpay someone, it gives them an articulate reason to leave. Fix the pay so you know the real reason.
Something I like to do, and that isn't normal, is ask them about their dreams. It turns a boring 1v1 into a quick detour into a fun-zone conversation. In some cases, I can show them a path at work that may prepare them better for what they'd want to do later in life.
It's hard to find someone better because we all have our own lenses to evaluate against. So sell the problem, not the role. See if they can tackle the challenge with confidence and how. You don't have to stay in false affirmations of teaching if you can allocate them really hard challenges and stay out of the way. You're just focusing on finding the next hard thing for them.