The anti-Amazon strategy for building killer teams
Learn how Amazon and Google hire. Then, do the opposite.
Over the last couple of years, I have had massive debates with managers/founders about the best hiring strategy. Or rather, as a marketing professional, my objective has been to understand what is it that founders/hiring managers are looking for in their recruitment pipeline.
As someone who built my own team from scratch here at FinBox over the last six months, I stumbled upon a few insights about my own self. This post is an amalgamation of my own observations, what worked and what didn’t and a lot of resources and conversations I scoured during the nerve-wracking process of building a team.
I realized that prefer to move fast and rely more on fitment and potential, while most of my peers tend to be the bar raisers in their respective functions/organizations. They prefer to hire only the absolute best candidates. They have learned this from books about Amazon, Google, and Netflix. The companies where hiring quality is never compromised for speed.
These devotees of perfection are now founders, managers, VPs in your network who are constantly cribbing about how tough it is to hire the right candidate and how it keeps them awake at night. Their concerns are very real and valid, except that there’s probably a solution (no silver bullets here) that could be hiding in plain sight.
We know that the hiring epidemic around us is truly real. The best people are being offered everything from a BMW bike to millions of $ in ESOPs and this situation made me think a little more deeply about the way recruiting works and how best could an organization/team leader approach it.
Here’s my own framework distilled largely from my personal experience, my reading of other people’s frameworks, insights from the current and past market structure, and my own experience as an employee, candidate, and sometimes, even being the hiring manager.
To borrow from Marvel, how do we get the Avengers to assemble?
Like most things in life and the internet, the solution is perhaps a simple five-step process.
Step 1: Build the A team
Step 2: Find the B team
Step 3: Elevate the B team
Step 4: Elevate the A team further
Step 5: Rinse and repeat
The A-team
Ask any founder or a leader of any kind and they’ll tell you that talent is perhaps the only real differentiator and competitive advantage in the market.
However, where I feel most people go off the track is when they think they need 100% of the team strength to be visionaries, overachievers, burnout-as-a-way-of-life type of people. While these people are the flag bearers of any organization’s progress, trying to hire them is an immensely difficult task. Their pay is the biggest hurdle for a startup but at the same time, compensation is not even their priority when considering a place to move to.
These A team candidates look for vision, opportunity, growth, and other intangibles that could take ages to build and convey. At the same time, they are likely to be so driven and committed that they don’t even have the time to take your company’s pitch seriously. And if the A team candidates you interview come onboard easy, they are probably not A team material just yet.
This is the point at which we encounter a problem.
Problem: Your product and business teams need at least 15 people in the next 2 months to just deliver the pre-set objectives for the existing team. But you haven’t got more than 5 A-level leads in total and not one of these five is yet confirmed to come onboard.
Now, if one would follow Amazon or Google’s hiring philosophy or books written on other such trailblazing organizations, they would source more intensely, continue with the same raise-the-bar process and keep interviewing.
The only problem? Sourcing is expensive and every ineligible candidate is a dead weight on the company’s time, resources, and cash which could have been spent better. Google and Amazon can afford to have elaborate hiring systems and raise-the-bar kind of models because they already have a workforce in tens of thousands, if not millions.
They won’t cease operations suddenly if their regional product team is on vacation or has a dozen openings. They have built - what I call excess capacity in the system to:
Absorb the pressure
Not let them fall into the trap of hiring someone mediocre just because there’s too much pressure; and,
Give them the luxury to offer vacation days and work-life balance without making a big deal out of it
At this point, and this applies more to early-stage or growth-stage startups, I suggest a solution - something that worked for me.
And the solution is to build excess capacity. While most startups today have plenty of money to throw at the problem, tightly run businesses such as bootstrapped organizations or servicing businesses such as agencies, etc do not.
They neither have the money to get all A-players in the world nor the patience to go hunting for them one by one because these companies serve dozens of clients at a time. Clients who have outsourced possibly because they haven’t been able to build in-house capacity themselves.
So what should one do when faced with this tangle?
I suggest department leaders/functional heads should hire the best-fit candidates from all available options and look for the ones with the most potential.
The key difference between an A team player and a B team player is not really that much talent and skill but it’s that of exposure. With exposure and experience, anyone who works hard can become an A team player.
However, it doesn't work the other way round. It's usually very difficult to get an A-team leader to execute basic tasks or deal with the drudgery of excel sheets and nuances. Their playground is more strategic than that. If you expect them to do execution, the chances are most will leave before their first coffee.
For instance, when hiring a writer for our own marketing function, I prefer to look at people who are good writers and have a demonstrated flair for storytelling as opposed to people who are experts in marketing strategy or finance, or technology.
That’s a secondary skill that can be taught on the job but if I wait to find that one writer who knows FinTech and writes well and is available to join immediately and comes within the budget, it’s only going to be an exercise in failure.
Instead, you get the best functional people, give them domain expertise and empower them with the freedom to innovate and they'll probably do miracles.
This doesn’t mean that hiring mediocre talent is necessary to scale. Quite the opposite, my thesis is that hiring for teams must be done more strategically than just looking for the smartest people.
An organization is like a human body. It needs brains and hearts but it also needs arms, legs, lungs, liver, and knees. If we over-index on one function, dysfunction is going to be the least of our problems.
Similarly, a team needs an executioner or a go-getter, a planner, or a coordinator. If you fill the team with visionaries and puffed-ego strategists, there’s a high chance that the team will always be too busy planning to get anything real done.
A better way, forward, in my opinion, is then to only select the best of the best candidates for A teams - leadership positions in departments and teams.
And reduce the criteria for strategic insight or exposure as you hire for levels below. Instead, increase the criteria for functional expertise and attitude because those are the people who will have their jobs on the line and their careers are yet to be made.
They are not going to disappoint if they are led by smart, empathetic, and insightful leaders who are invested in their growth. By hiring more than necessary A team-ers, you run the risk of basically having turf-wars, envelope-pushing, and unnecessary political conflicts within the workplace.
At the same time, the organization is a perpetual entity and your A team is always going to be constantly poached by competitors from your or other industries. Hence, it becomes more important to have a deeper execution and management-in-waiting team that’s not just your hidden treasure trove but also on its way to becoming the A team through trials by fire and learning by doing.
In the end, it is all about strategically creating teams and functions such that it is the smartest people leading the best executioners towards being future leaders. Ultimately, nobody learns leadership or strategy at business schools or in the C-suite, we learn it through exposure, observation, execution, and failure.
Bottom line: If you wait to hire only Steve Jobs, know that they could be busy building Apple. Instead, start with a potential Sundar Pichai and elevate them till you don't hear of Larry Page in the news anymore :)
My personal favorite adage applies here:
“Expect the best and people will rise to the occasion.”