{"id":1057,"date":"2010-10-18T12:23:45","date_gmt":"2010-10-18T11:23:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/t-machine.org\/?p=1057"},"modified":"2010-10-18T12:23:45","modified_gmt":"2010-10-18T11:23:45","slug":"hiring-people-smarter-than-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/2010\/10\/18\/hiring-people-smarter-than-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Hiring people smarter than you"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Startup CEOs are often advised to do this, but few people explain how the heck to do that, and its far easier said than done.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/bhorowitz.com\/2010\/10\/14\/hiring-executives-if-you%e2%80%99ve-never-done-the-job-how-do-you-hire-somebody-good\/?utm_source=twitterfeed&#038;utm_medium=twitter\">Ben&#8217;s got a great approach: actually do each of the jobs yourself, for real, before hiring people into them<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This resonates with my own experience, where &#8220;deliberate self obsolescence&#8221; has proved the most effective strategy for hiring senior management. Do everything yourself, and keep trying to make yourself redundant, by finding the most time-consuming thing you&#8217;re currently doing, and hiring someone else to do it.<\/p>\n<p>This approach also neatly solves the eternal problem of &#8220;which role do we hire next?&#8221; &#8211; in a *prioritasable* fashion (which is important if you believe in scrum\/agile\/lean measurement, and can&#8217;t accept the answer &#8220;all of them!&#8221;).<\/p>\n<p>PS a lovely quote in the linked post:<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The more experience you have, the more you realize that there is something seriously wrong with every employee in your company (including you).&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>QFT.<\/p>\n<p>Personally, I finally escaped from this trap only when I started hiring on &#8220;enthusiasm&#8221; rather than on &#8220;skill&#8221;. So far, it&#8217;s not lead me astray&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Startup CEOs are often advised to do this, but few people explain how the heck to do that, and its far easier said than done. Ben&#8217;s got a great approach: actually do each of the jobs yourself, for real, before hiring people into them. This resonates with my own experience, where &#8220;deliberate self obsolescence&#8221; has [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,8,46],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/new.t-machine.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}