kidmercury

Marc Andreesen has an outstanding post on hiring, in which he drops some serious knowledge. That post got me reminiscing back to the days when I was working for the Man, as the most important work I did in my service to the Man was in hiring: I hired a lot of sales people, and I hired pretty much the entire marketing department. Here are some thoughts I have on assembling the digital dream team:

1. Intelligence is way overrated. Like Marc noted in his post, intelligence is vastly overrated. In fact, I think it can often become a negative: a smart person is often told that they are smart, and hence have all these attitude and entitlement issues, and act like they are too good for certain types of menial labor. This type of attitude problem was one of the first things I would look for, as it can be an absolute cancer to an organization and needs to be prevented against at almost all costs.

2. Drive is way underrated. Again, like Marc noted in his post, a person's drive is the real indicator of their potential. More importantly, drive is the one thing that really can't be taught. One of the reasons intelligence is overrated is because good employers are often good teachers; they know that in today's economy knowledge sharing and knowledge management is at the heart of the game. When I was involved in hiring, I came from the perspective that my team and I would be able to teach new employees, even really dumb ones, everything they would need to be superstar employees. There was only one thing we couldn't teach them: drive. With that in mind, interviewees who had a real hunger for both personal success and collaborative success were at the top of the list.

3. Fire quickly. One of the hardest lessons I had to learn when working for the Man was the importance of firing. I consider myself to be a nice guy, and I don't really get a kick out of ruining someone's life by firing them. But I quickly learned that if I didn't ruin the life of troublesome employees who deserved to be fired, than I would end up ruining the lives of all the employees in the company (even the good ones, who don't deserve such treatment). Ideally, you filter out all the crap before it gets in -- but realistically speaking, you're going to get a few bad apples, as no process is perfect. Keep an eye out for them and remove them IMMEDIATELY. Few things are more cancerous to an organization than bad employees, whose bad attitude and bad work ethic are just as contagious as the positive attributes of good employees.

Of course, the real secret is to keep your team as small as possible, as management these days has a lot to do with managing the edge -- the world outside of your organization. Mastery of this principle is where the next big management innovation will come from.