What Do Hiring And Eating Have In Common?
By: Tarun Kohli
Tags: Work, Talent Acquisition, Startup Lessons, Culture, Hiring

I recently had an epiphany. The one that makes you go ‘aha!’. The one that comes naturally, but unexpectedly and lights up your brain with clarity — like the monsoon rain, which wipes away the accumulated dust from the leaves of forgotten plants and brings out the vivid green in them.

Okay, technically it wasn’t mine.

My friend and a long term colleague, Sudesh, had it while we were having our weekly 9 AM hiring-review meeting. We were looking at the impending gap in our hiring timelines. We were lagging behind by a week and achieving our targets looked insurmountable for at least a few more weeks.

Our discussion started gliding towards how we had set to seek candidates akin to a mythical purple squirrel and why we shouldn’t keep our hopes high because of the volatility in talent-market.

Just about then he said —

“You know, hiring is like eating. You become what you eat.”

He didn’t appreciate hearing things like- “Why can’t we compromise on certain skill-sets ?” “Do engineers really need to have great communication skills?” This statement was his way of making clear that compromise is a slippery slope that leads to talent dilution.

When he said this, I was eating my usual breakfast of deep-fried aloo parathas with the creamy, sunshine like yellow Amul butter, and my heart missed a beat. No, not because of the artery choking fat in my food, um, it could have been that too.

But, it was because he said such a profound statement. I quickly devoured this unhealthy mass of wheat, aloo, and butter and started reflecting on it.

Health coaches preach about how healthy food options are necessary to build good muscle, a healthy gut, and a resilient immune system. If you’ve ever consulted (a good) one, you would know how they never suggest crash diets for losing weight.

How I wish we had someone similar in our industry — hiring coaches, maybe?

People who talk passionately about how investing time in finding the right person is absolutely crucial for organizational success. People who understand that the initial pain of finding the right talent (akin to finding a needle in a haystack) gives benefits in the long run.

Of course, every organization wants to hire great people and do it fast. But sometimes in the rush of closing the positions, hiring managers find comfort in Jeff Bezos’s philosophy of reversible doors — if things don’t work out, you can always ask the person to leave.

But it’s not that easy, Sherlock.

When you let a bad hire go, it creates a rubber-band effect in the team — you can get rid of them but the team usually doesn’t return to the same normal. It’s akin to those rumpled brownish scars on the skin after the body has healed from a bad burn.

So, what did I learn from my epiphany?

Start by investing time in hiring the right people.

It’s simple — an investment may take some effort in the short term, but always benefits in the long run. It not only saves you time and effort in aligning them towards organizational goals, but also helps in building your organization’s muscle and immune system.

Which made me realize the next point,

Great people are like antibodies, they protect your organization.

Your antibodies are your first line of defense, and so are great people in the organization. When they see that something is not right, they call it out. You don’t have to wait for the symptoms to appear. These people call things out as soon as they happen.

They go an extra mile to ensure that only quality work gets delivered. They uphold the cultural values of the organization and even take care of the viruses in the form of bad hires, which accidentally enter into your system.

And the corollary to that is -

Bad hires, like junk food, potentially rot the system inside out.

This rotting exhibits itself in myriad ways — lack of speed of execution, sloppy quality of work, disengagement, or even politicking. And just like junk food, the more you continue with the rotten system, the effort of cleaning up becomes more difficult, with the good hires potentially leaving for other ‘great’ places.

This is why — if you end up with a tsunami of bad hires (especially while blitzscaling) it could lead to the untimely demise of your company as these viruses have the potential to kill the antibodies in your system.