On Hiring: Seven Principles (Version 1.0)
3 min readMay 27, 2022
- Every job description for meaningful work will converge to “creative, adaptive problem solver.”(cit. V. Ming): The world is increasingly VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) and on the top of that physical and cognitive routine labour is becoming automated. In a socio-economic environment innervated by fat tails, global shocks and AIs, value will be added by adaptive learners dealing with complexity.
- Potential > Experience: IQ + drive + creativity move planets. Not everyone should be top in every dimension but the baseline should be ambitious. A hungry, motivated person with high fluid intelligence can outsmart, outwork and out-flexible-behave established players.
- High ambition with low ego: This is the right — and rare — combination in terms of mindset / character / personality. Ambition provides the vision and energy to reach uncommon goals. It will also help in being contagious and motivate others with your dreams. Low ego means being humble when necessary, finding the way to your goals learning from other people, other disciplines, dismantling your own prejudices and habits.
- No compromises: You should be elitist and hyper-selective in onboarding people, being uncompromising in terms of character, intelligence and competence requirements. Zero tolerance for winding down standards because of rush / immediate needs, hiring interns / juniors for a favor to a client, lowering the bar because the hiring process is long and costly. The top CEOs are recruiters. This is incredibly hard in some cases (i.e. hiring technical profiles), but look at the next points.
- Explore strange places: Some of the best people came from nontraditional backgrounds, strange disciplines, peripherical universities, failed companies, unlikely habits. The finance person from a secondary business school, the non-extroverted salesperson, the data scientist with a non-quantitative degree. They have hidden treasures, are highly motivated, offer uncommon perspectives and often overcompensate their lack of visible pedigree in surprising ways. In corporate speak, when engaged in hiring it pays off to be contrarian, finding the “blue oceans”, uncommon talents pools hidden beyond the small groups contended by every consulting firm / investment bank / law firm / megacorporation / tech company.
- Diversity beyond the hype: Building a psychological ecology in your organizations pays off. First of all diversify yourself as a manager/CEO/recruiter, avoiding the common urge to hire copycats of yourself. Team members should compensate each other in terms of strengths / weaknesses, backgrounds and areas of interest. Embrace diversity crossing multiple boundaries: socioeconomic status, professional background, gender, nationality, ethnicity, lifestyle, beliefs, family, age, communication style, career objectives, personal interests.
- Trust peers: Smart, creative, uncommon people often know each other. Sometimes they worked or studied together, but more frequently they are connected because of weak ties developed with niche interest group: from social causes to obscure programming languages, from otaku anime / gaming communities to meetups regarding fringe intellectual interests. They are connected because of reputation within their peer group and network centrality inside their community. They worked in challenging projects or built something together, created open source projects, blogs, podcasts, TikTok channels, startups (most of the times failed, but it doesn’t matter), volunteer and activism initiatives. Great minds think alike, or at least gamed / tik tokked / coded / blogged / meetupped together.
