Hiring Secrets: Ben Horowitz
“Hire for strength rather than lack of weakness”. In this article, we distill Ben Horowitz’s hiring wisdom and reverse-engineer it into actionable advice that will help you stand out from the crowd.
Hire for strength rather than lack of weakness. In his book “The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers”, Ben Horowitz shares how he learned this wisdom the hard way.
Hiring a Genius Head of Sales
Horowitz badly needed the new Head of Sales to rebuild his company. None of over twenty candidates he had interviewed so far had the strengths he was looking for. And then he interviewed Mark Cranney, who
did not have the looks of a sales executive
did not have the “right” school on his résumé
made people uncomfortable
seemed to be a bad cultural fit.
And yet, despite the lack of the “right” pedigree, Cranney quickly imposed himself as the best candidate for the role. First by acing profile and interview questions. Then by showing to Horowitz a giant Sales Training Manual he had designed. Then, by teaching Horowitz within one hour more about Sales than he had learned himself during six months running sales. And finally, but providing a list of seventy-five references who all called Horowitz back within one hour.
With these exceptional strengths, it was clear to Horowitz that Cranney was “the One”. And still, he had yet to convince the board members who were stuck with obvious weaknesses. His conversation with Marc Andreessen went this way:
Marc opened the conversation by listing his issues with Cranney: doesn’t look or sound like a head of sales, went to a weak school, makes him uncomfortable.
I listened very carefully and replied, “I agree with every single one of those issues. However, Mark Cranney is a sales savant. He has mastered sales to a level that far exceeds anybody that I have ever known. If he didn’t have the things wrong with him that you enumerated, he wouldn’t be willing to join a company that just traded at thirty-five cents per share; he’d be CEO of IBM.”
Marc’s reply came quickly: “Got it. Let’s hire him!” And that’s how I took the key step in building a world-class software team out of the Loudcloud rubble.
The strengths that Ben Horowitz badly needed to rebuild the company and finally found in Mark Cranney were so critical that they completely outweighed the weaknesses. And it was a story with a happy-end.
As I got to know Mark over the years, everything that I learned in the interview and the reference check proved out. He wasn’t an easy cultural fit, but he was a genius. I needed his genius and worked with him on the fit. I don’t know that every member of the team ever became totally comfortable with Mark, but in the end they all agreed that he was the best person possible for the job.
How to hire someone good. And how to show you are that someone.
Horowitz summarised his principles of hiring good executives in an article on his blog. Let’s look at those principles and reverse-engineer them into useful takeaways for career transitions.
Hiring Step 1. Know what you want.
If we skip this step or take it lightly, we risk to fall into the following traps:
hiring on look and feel
hiring for an imaginary model, not for Your company for This particular point in time
valuing lack of weaknesses rather than strengths.
The more experience you have, the more you realize that there is something seriously wrong with every employee in your company (including you). Literally, nobody is perfect. As a result, it is imperative that you hire for strength rather than lack of weakness. Everybody has weaknesses; they are just easier to find in some people. Hiring for lack of weakness just means that you’ll optimize for pleasantness. Rather, you must figure out the strengths you require and find someone who is world class in those areas despite their weaknesses in other, less important domains.
Being-hired takeaway 1: Understand what they want. Understand what you want
understand the job you are being hired for. Use informational interview or real job interview to discover it and refine your understanding.
understand the current context and direction of the company. Companies at “wartime” have very different requirements than companies in “peacetime”. Companies in growth phase would need different people than mature companies.
understand the strengths required and whether you are world-class in those areas. Do your have those critical strengths needed by that concrete company, here and now, so that they make you stand out from the crowd? Are your strengths so strong that they will make your counterpart tolerate your weaknesses?
if you have those strengths, build your story around them. As for weaknesses, you can briefly talk about them using “accusation audit” approach and swiftly zoom on strengths.
finally, get absolutely clear on what YOU want: which of your requirements towards the company/role are non-negotiable musts, and which problematic areas you will be willing to tolerate.
Hiring Step 2. Build the process that figures out the right match.
Write down the strengths you want and the weaknesses you are willing to tolerate.
Develop questions that test for the criteria.
Assemble an appropriate interview team and conduct the interviews.
Collect backdoor and front door references.
Being-hired takeaway 2: Prepare for the interview process.
prepare stories that illustrate your strengths.
think about all possible questions that could be asked to test you on those strengths and get ready with the answers.
ask who will be on the interview team and understand their profiles and expectations
get your references ready. And get ready that there will be backdoor references. Do you have any skeletons in your closet?
Hiring Step 3. Make a Lonely Decision.
Despite many people being involved in the process, the ultimate decision should be made solo.
Being-Hired Takeaway 3. Make a Lonely Decision.
Despite many people being involved in the process, the ultimate decision should be made solo. How certain are you that you and the hiring manager, you and the hiring company are the right fit?
Want to Know More?
If you want why Mark Cranney accepted the job, you have to read Ben Horowitz’s second book “What You Do is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture”.
Art: Liu Bolin, “Hiding in the City - Instant Noodles”, 2013. Galerie Paris-Beijing