Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:07:59 · Brian Halligan
[00:07:59] S0: I think even me, I've been doing this for 150 years, I still think I overrate my ability to interview someone, and really know if they're a good fit. I give a couple pieces of advice. Parker Conrad has a good hack that I liked. Before he's got a C-level interview, CFO, chief product officer, whatever, he has some sign an NDA, and sends them the last board deck, or the board memo, or some important doc, and he schedules a half hour interview with them, and he just has a chat about the decks. And if they're just very complimentary, and it's so great, and you're doing this amazing thing, it's a major red flag to him because he wants someone that will challenge him and not a yes person. And I thought that was a pretty good hack to get inside someone's head and how they think and how they'll interact with you. Getting on a whiteboard and working through a problem I think is always a good thing. I think the standard interview of walking through your background, I don't think is all that valuable. And I coach people to do blind references, find someone you know that work with them... VCs are good at this by the way. And I get a lot of these, and you can tell some of them are like, we've already decided we're checking the box, versus they're asking me hard questions about this person. And one of my favorite questions people ask is, would you enthusiastically rehire this person for that role? Which I think is a really good question. On a scale of one to 10, how likely is it that you'll try to rehire this person back from me down the road? I think those types of questions are good, so not mailing an in on those blind references I think is really good. My other piece of advice, and no one listens to me on this, is hire slow and fire fast. People hire fast and fire slow. If I had to guess, Lenny, with 18 months after you hire a C-level exec, at least 50% of the time they're gone. High mortality rate on them, it's harder than people think.
00:10:10 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brian Halligan
[00:10:10] S1: And so, what you're saying here is there's only so much you can actually do to increase those odds. [00:10:15] S0: I think you can, I think the blind references are key, I think doing real interactive, working on a project together is key. I'll tell you one of the things we learned at HubSpot about this. We would have a candidate come in, let's say a head of engineering, and we'd have eight people interview them. And our scale's one to four. And let's say four people were four out of four, and four people were two out of four. So, that's candidate A. And then the next candidate comes in, eight people interview them, and everyone's a three out of four. Almost every time we hired the three out of four, the person with the least amount of weaknesses. And we changed it, and we went with the spikier people, we went with people with weaknesses, we with people who would challenge stuff, and that has worked out quite well. Our hit rate at HubSpot's improved. We also have shrunk the pool of people on that interview panel from eight to four. We just hired a head of product, and there were just four of us that interviewed them. I think that worked too. So, I think there's things you can do to get better at it, for sure. [00:11:21] S1: Okay. This is incredibly tactical and useful. On the references piece, the toughest part is getting people to be honest because there's very little upside to them to say negative things about people. Is there anything that you've learned to help get real honest answers from folks you call for references?
00:11:38 · Brian Halligan
[00:11:38] S0: Well, I can just say I don't do this a lot anymore, but when people call me, I can tell if they've already decided, and when they're really just looking for... When they ask me for the strengths and weaknesses I'm like, oh, they've already decided. When they ask me something hard, like on a scale of one to 10, how likely you're to hire them again? Stuff like that, that kind of gets at the core. Or were they the top 1% of your employees? That's a good question. Oh, were they top 10? Oh. That type of question is pretty good. So, when I'm on the other side of it, I like when those types of questions come up. I tell you the other mistake everyone makes, and all the CEOs we're making now, is you're hiring for that whatever, head of engineering, and you're blown away by the resume. Like you're 50 employees and you're hiring this person, who's been at Microsoft the last 10 years, and has a fancy title, and is a fancy division in Microsoft, and you hire them, there's just a massive impedance mismatch when you hire them on what their expectations are, and what your expectations are, in the extent that you get your shit together. It's just you don't. You definitely don't, if you're 50 or 500 employees. And they expect you to have your act together. So, that is another... Avoid the big company hire. We hired so many people from Salesforce, and Google, and Microsoft, like 100% attrition rate on all those folks.
00:13:11 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brian Halligan
[00:13:11] S1: Something that I've seen that a lot of companies is there's phases of like, okay, now it's the McKinsey, a cohort comes in, and we think that's going to be the answer, and then it's the Apple group, and then that didn't work out, then the Amazon group. [00:13:22] S0: The McKinsey one never works. It never works. It never works. By definition, they would fail on my spectrum of... Most founders are like me, they are skeptical of dimensional wisdom, they're unhappy with the world works in some way, and so they're kind of far on that spectrum of rethinking dimensional wisdom. And almost by definition somebody who goes to work for McKinsey is very conservative in their outlook. And so, I think that almost always fails. [00:13:50] S1: We're on this s hiring thread, so let me keep following this conversation. I read somewhere that you recommend building your team like the 2004 Red Sox. What does this mean? [00:14:03] S0: Well, I'm a big sports fan, a big Boston Red... And the Boston Red Sox hadn't won, Lenny, a World Series in 86 years, since they traded Babe Ruth. [00:14:12] S1: I remember that.
00:14:12 · Lenny Rachitsky, Brian Halligan
[00:14:12] S1: I remember that. [00:14:13] S0: And they finally broke, and they finally won it in 2004. And the way they won it was they had a team of a bunch homegrown, really high quality, inexpensive talent that they drafted and came through the farm system. And then they got a few free agents, like David Ortiz, that a lot of people have heard of, that they paid a fair amount of money to. Pedro Martinez and Curt Schilling were kind of the canonical older been there, done that, bigger company folks. And they mixed really nicely, the culture really worked. And I think that's the key. I think people underrate their homegrown talent, almost across the board they underrate it. And I think you want that mix. You don't want to hire a whole bunch of been there, done that, and you don't want to hire [inaudible 00:14:57]. [00:14:57] S1: I imagine this is public, but you're now part owner of the Red Sox, is that right? [00:15:00] S0: I am a part owner of the Red Sox, yes. [00:15:02] S1: Okay, I have questions for you along those lines. [00:15:04] S0: Okay. [00:15:06] S1: Okay, that's amazing advice. Kind of what I'm taking away here is people see all these fancy logos, amazing person, VP, this, that at Salesforce, Amazon, Google, whatever, and what you're saying here is don't underestimate the power of someone internal, rising to the occasion. [00:15:22] S0: Yeah. If you look at HubSpot, half the management team are folks who had been there for approximately 150 years, which I like. And same with, you look at Apple, a lot of those people are homegrown.
00:15:22 · Brian Halligan, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:15:22] S0: Yeah. If you look at HubSpot, half the management team are folks who had been there for approximately 150 years, which I like. And same with, you look at Apple, a lot of those people are homegrown. [00:15:32] S1: And so, is there any tips here for doing this well, is it just give people a chance? [00:15:36] S0: I tend to give people a chance. It's like, if you're interviewing someone that's homegrown, and they're VP for that C-level job, versus hiring someone from the outside. I hire someone from the outside, they're very good at interviewing, from a big company, they look fancy, they're shiny, you haven't seen their warts, hard to figure out their warts unless you're very good at line referencing, and so you tend to overrate them and underrate your homegrown. So, if it's pretty close, I think you give your homegrown a shot at it. What's interesting to me, Lenny, is Brian Chesky sort of rethought a lot of this stuff, and he's like everyone's over-rotating to the homegrown to the experienced talent and management teams and delegation, I think he's mostly right about that. People haven't really followed that. People are, they're hiring people from the outside quite a bit. That's kind of the standard part of the playbook that all of them are following now. It's a little different, it's actually quite different than what Brian [inaudible 00:16:32].