A short YouTube talk (clip) featuring Jason Fried (Basecamp) arguing that founders or existing team members should perform a role themselves before hiring for it. He explains this by describing Basecamp’s early experience: founders ran customer support and system administration for years so they could accurately evaluate hires, and he recommends growing slowly to learn how the business functions first.
Chapters
We thought we needed a biz dev guy. And I don't know why we thought this, but we're like, you know, everyone needs a biz dev guy, right? We need biz dev. Gotta generate some biz. So let's get a biz dev guy. So I started interviewing biz dev guys and their resumes are impressive and, you know, they're well dressed and all the stuff that you would expect from a biz dev guy. And they use impressive words in the whole thing and, you know, everything's great. And, you know, I don't know what the fucking question to ask them. I don't know what I'm supposed to ask them. I don't know what I'm supposed to hear from them. I don't know if what they're saying is right. And the reason why is because I've never done that job, and no one in our company has ever done that job. So how can we possibly evaluate somebody when we don't know what they do? So I figured this out. This is something we figured out kind of a while ago, but I forgot about it when I was looking to hire a biz dev guy. And the key is you have to do the job for us before you can hire someone to do it. That's my point of view. And if it's not you, maybe it's your business partner, maybe it's somebody else in the company, but somebody internally should try and do something before you hire someone else to do it if it hasn't been done before. Because you can try and spend your way out of problems, or you can try to learn your way out of problems. And I think if you try and learn your way out of a problem, you're going to come up with a much better solution and a much wider solution. Not just a small solution by hiring somebody, but a deep understanding of that problem and that solution. When we first hired a customer service person, I did customer service for like two or three years. Before that, I answered all the emails. So I knew who to hire and what questions to ask and if they were bullshitting me or not or if they were going to be good at doing that job. Before we hired a system administrator, David, my business partner, and Jamis, one of our programmers, did our system administration for the first three years actually before we hired a system administrator, because then we would know the job intimately. We could evaluate quality and personality and skills in a very deep, intimate manner that we couldn't if we were just hiring someone who we didn't actually know the job. So one of the problems with this is people freak out. They say, well, we can't grow fast then, because if it's just a couple of us, we haven't done a lot of things. What if we need other people? And my suggestion is always just in general to grow slowly. This actually puts a really good constraint on you. It forces you to learn stuff, which is really important, especially if you're running a business. You should really know just about how to do everything that's going on in your business. Now, I'm not a system administrator, but I know a little bit about it. I'm not a programmer, but I know a little bit about it. That's because I've been around it and I try to do it myself for a while. And that really does help you understand the people who are working for you and the people you have to hire. So keep that in mind when you go off and hire somebody, try and do the job first.
