Don't Hire Yourself
The hire that would fail a 'beer with this person' test is usually the one that changes the company.
When I was in my twenties I played elite volleyball. As elite as volleyball gets in the UK, which is not very.
One thing from those courts has shaped every hiring decision I have made since.
Volleyball is a real team sport. The opposition spends the first three points working out who your weakest player is. Once they have found him, they serve on him every time. They hit through him. The match is decided not by your strongest player but by how exposed your weakest one is.
No two players on the team had the same strengths. The job was to harness the differences, not smooth them out.
John Nash was the England head coach at the time. He said something I have repeated in interviews and board rooms ever since.
“You don’t have to like your team members. Just play with them.”
Most leaders do the opposite. They hire people they like. People who went to similar universities. People who tell similar jokes. People they would go for a beer with after work. The team feels comfortable in the room and looks one-dimensional everywhere else. The opposition finds the weak point and there is no one with a different strength to cover it.
I have been guilty of this. The Clearswift hire for head of inside sales is the moment I remember most clearly.
Inside sales people spend their day on the phone. They get rejected ninety-eight percent of the time and dial again. They are loud. They run competitions. They buy donuts and announce that the team can have one when they have hit ten grand in the morning. They are a very different breed to me.
I interviewed five or six candidates. None of them felt right. Then I realised why. They were not like me. I was looking for someone I would enjoy a glass of red with. The right hire was someone who would buy the team a tray of donuts and run a leaderboard on the wall.
We hired her. Bubbly. Gregarious. Competition every morning, donuts on Fridays, leaderboard on the wall. The phones lit up. The pipeline grew. I went for beers with her in the end. That was the consequence of the hire, not the reason for it.
Apertio was the same lesson on a different role.
I had inherited a likeable product manager. Everyone got on with him. He said yes to everyone and built nothing. The roadmap drifted because no one could remember what had been promised in which meeting.
I replaced him with an ex-army officer. Different culture. Different background. Different way of running a room. He committed to a plan, shared it, and held the line. People knew where they stood. They did not mind hearing no, because the yeses got delivered six months later when the release shipped.
Both hires would have failed a “beer with this person” test on the day. Both turned out to be the most consequential hires I made in those companies.
The same pattern shows up on boards. The chair or the lead investor nominates someone they worked with at a previous company. The CEO knows the candidate is a known quantity and struggles to argue against it. The board ends up with another version of the people already in the room. The one new perspective the company actually needed gets quietly priced out of the search.
The test for any leader is simple.
Who on your team is better than you at the thing you are worst at?
If the answer is no one, you have not been hiring. You have been recruiting yourself.