Emil Michael on hiring at scale: he conducted roughly 3,000 interviews over four years at Uber by doing 3 per day, treating recruiting as a core discipline. For executives, expect 50% to fail, spend more time probing beneath the pitch, and prioritize emotional maturity and low ego over credentials.
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So of course, you also have some really great experience when it not only comes to team building, but, you know, executive hiring. So do you have any, maybe any kind of tips that you could share with us here as founders when it comes to team building and executive hiring?
Yeah, I mean, I took recruiting as a very serious part of my job and it was so painful. So I had to, I had to Get in my mind. I did 3 interviews a day, 30 minutes each, 5 days a week for my entire 4 years at Uber. So that meant that I was— I did about 750 interviews a year for 4 years, 3,000 interviews over 4 years. And sometimes they didn't even have a job opening. I just want to meet people, categorize them, figure out when I needed them. I knew who the best people in the world are and why. I refined my interview questions. I created a machine on it. And the reason is, is because, you know, it's so trite to say that the people are everything, but it's something that no human likes to do as a job is to interview. But if you can force yourself to make it part of your job, and I figured out how to constrain it, then it's sort of a top of funnel thing. Like the more data points you put in the top of funnel, the better quality, you're going to get out the bottom, right? So, and I made sure that people felt respected during the interview. I always followed up. I always said no quickly if it was a no quickly. I never wanted to be one of those companies that just flaked because I wanted to be the company that people knew they could come to to get an answer quickly. And that made my funnel better, right? People are like, oh, these guys are fast. They have an opinion, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. So I really took it as a core competency in my job. That's generally. When it came to execs, it's very, it's harder in that execs you need to spend more time with because there's higher risk and higher reward. And execs by definition have gotten through life being charming and knowing how to do interviews. So they're much more adept at the whole process. So your job as a hiring manager in that situation is to try to get underneath the gloss and find out who this person really is. What do they and their family want? Are they going to fit? Are they— they say they're going to fit. They say they want to work this hard. They say they want this kind of experience. But do they really? And no matter how good a job you do, the failure rate with hiring execs is still 50/50 because it's just a very high failure rate. And my only advice there is do your best upfront. And if it's not working, mutually agree that it's not working, you know, quickly. And usually you could tell within 6 months whether it's working or not. And some of this comes from You know, they've been at a big company or they've been at a small company that got big, their desire to do the work that a startup needs wanes and they may not even know it, right? They don't, they've forgotten, they don't want to build desks anymore. They want to have papers presented to them and proposals and sit in rooms and make decisions. And that's not how it is at a startup, right? Everyone's Everyone's in the fight. So the fighting spirit, the ability to not have ego, especially when it comes to young people who've built a company. And that's really one of the big failure points. They come in sometimes and say, oh, I'm glad I'm here. I could teach the kids how to do X, Y, or Z. You're like, hey, these kids built this place before you got here, buddy. You know, I would take a step back and make sure you're adding value before you figure, you know, you're gonna teach other people how to do stuff. So it's that sort of emotional maturity, high EQ, low ego that ends up being points of success factors when you are looking to bring in those first 1 or 2 senior hires as the company gets its stride.
