Omar Zenhom explains Netflix's Keeper Test: would you fight to keep this employee if they got another offer? If not, don't hire them. He pairs it with the Rehire Thought Experiment, where you imagine firing everyone and rebuilding, then pick who you'd actually bring back.
Netflix has this concept called the Keeper Test. Every manager at Netflix regularly asks themselves a simple question: if this person told me they were leaving tomorrow, if they got another job offer somewhere else, would I fight to keep them? Or would I kind of secretly be like, that's okay, I can find somebody else? If the answer is anything less than an emphatic yes, that person should probably be somewhere else. You probably shouldn't hire them in the first place. Netflix fully understands this. Now there's another exercise that I recommend that you do that I teach inside the $100K Day program. And it's a thought experiment. It's the idea is that if you had to, you were forced to fire everybody on your team and have to start from zero, who would you rehire? This concept kind of gets you thinking, well, I don't have the burden of having to fire them or go through that painful— I have to do it. So they're all fired, they're gone. Now I got to choose who I can rehire. That is a different idea of like, who would I actually value and need? And they're actually adding a lot of value to the company. So this is a really, really good way to find out if your team has good talent density. Are most of the people you would rehire or most of the people, the people that you would fight for so you can keep?
