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How to Find and Hire Amazing People

If you’re staffing up an early stage startup or growing a small nonprofit, I recommend reading through Adam Smith’s fantastic four part guide on hiring great people.

There are many details, but the key points are:
  1. Don’t hire even a single bad employee
  2. Hire from your network
  3. Recruiters are a nightmare — don’t do it!
  4. Have high standards — interview few / hire fewer
  5. Test what the employee will do on the team in your interview
  6. Hire with commitment and momentum once you decide
  7. Pay market wages — lower/higher both backfire for different reasons

Author Description

Louie Helm is a Machine Learning Engineer

4 Responses to “How to Find and Hire Amazing People”

  1. April 29

    Luke Muehlhauser

    I read all of this and found it helpful, thanks. Now I want the person from Harvard/Princeton/MIT/Stanford who recruits hot young math research talent to write a tutorial like this for that situation.

  2. April 29

    Ben Kuhn

    Luke, you mean to go to the various colleges? I’m not sure there is one. The Harvard math department seems to have some problems even getting admissions to admit some top math talent in the first place. I don’t think they spend extra effort recruiting math people as opposed to anyone else.

    Looking at how a place like Jane Street does recruiting would probably be more fruitful.

  3. April 29

    Will Sawin

    Grad & postdoc might make more sense. But I think there’s no one person. Because math is more fragmented, it’s hard to judge math research talent unless you understand that research well, and that means different people have to judge different hot young stars.

    Another difference might be that at Harvard, Princeton, MIT, and Stanford, everyone in your field already wants to go there (at least if there’s faculty there they want to work with). So for these institutions, finding top talent is not a problem, it’s just differentiating it from the weak ones and convincing them to accept your job offer rather than someone else’s. Which, of course, are very interesting, complicated and difficult problems.

    That’s about the limit of my knowledge by osmosis.

  4. April 29

    Ben Kuhn

    “Grad & postdoc might make more sense.”

    Right. Whoops, I forgot that college students still count as “young talent”.