Want A Great Team? Focus On Talent, Not Hiring

First of all, the distinction in the title kind of seems like nonsense. You should focus on hiring talent. If you forget about talent, you might end up with crappy engineers. If you forget about hiring, you may not end up with any engineers.

More importantly, the author's goals are pretty unrealistic as a strategy to be applied wholesale to all companies hiring engineering talent, or even just startups hiring engineering talent.

From my understanding, the author posits that when seeking an engineer, you need to find someone that 1) is good enough to start (read: co-found) a company with you; 2) knock the socks off the company in 90 days (read: in 3 months, you need to be talented enough to contribute in a way that significantly changes or improves the company); and 3) someone who is "destined" to succeed in big ways (i.e. start a new company that's changing the industry).

The sum of all this seems to be that the author is suggesting that the way to build a great team is to find and only hire those engineers that are in the top 1% or 0.5% of the field. I'm sure that's a fantastic way to build a team, but it's not at all realistic, especially as a wholesale strategy. These people are hard to find; there are only so many of them. A startup is probably lucky if they can find one. It's pretty unreasonable to expect any company to build a team of exclusively these kind of engineers.

It's a nice suggestion, but until we figure out how to come up with these amazing engineers, it doesn't solve anyone's problem of building a great team.

The author has the right idea with the first item. Time, trust, and communication are essentials in hiring.

But flying this under the banner of "talent" is bordering on link-bait. Look at all the points he makes about hiring a "talented" individual:

* "...we’re asking whether you have the mettle to be part of an elite team."

* "A new hire won’t come up with something mind blowing if the team doesn’t bring the new hire up to speed quickly."

* "I don’t necessarily expect a new hire to do something amazing while he or she works with us."

* "A new hire won’t do something amazing, now or in the future, if the organization he or she works for doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain."

None of this is about talent. It's about a supportive ecosystem and cohesive team.

"Talent" is just a label that HR applies to people they think will succeed in an organization, and an after-the-fact definition when an individual has found success in his or her role. And it's been my experience that those two groups are far from congruent.

The author was Chief Product Officer of Color Labs. Case in point with his last gig... a great team is nothing without a product that people can understand.

I find this article completely laughable because the advice seems to be look to hire someone who has all the abilities and drive to start their own company and will do something mind blowing for your company. Well guess what? These candidates already are starting their own company and aren't going to be attracted by your .25% or even 5% equity. This is like the high school version of rejecting people to go to the prom with and then when the prom comes, low and behold you have nobody to go with - in other words, if you follow this rubric you're probably not going to end up hiring anyone.

How about this for advice instead... Find someone who can fill and execute on a specific need for your business in a cost effective way.

This article was well written but deceptively pointless.

The title is just a meaningless game of semantics, and the article doesn't contain a single shred of useful information that wouldn't qualify as common sense. Trust, communication, personality... are these really things anyone needs to be told to look for in job candidates? If so, the tech industry (and humanity, in general) is in pretty dismal shape.

And how does it help to ask ambiguous things like "In four to six years, will you be doing something amazing?" That's just asinine, not to mention lazy. It's the interviewer's job to glean that information from answers to more thoughtful, deliberate questions.