How to hire: keep track of the best people you know, ask them for recommendations

The best people you know often get jobs they love, which they will not leave to come work for you, therefore you can’t hire them, but you can hire the people they recommend.

Would I ever hire someone before I’ve met them? Not exactly, but I have been 90% certain I’m going to hire someone based entirely on the recommendations I got from people I trust. It’s the collective judgment of my friends that have lead to some of the best hires I’ve ever made.

What Emily Saint-Gensis says in the quote above may have been a joke, but it really applies well to screening possible job applicants. I’d much rather talk to someone recommended by someone I trust than try to wade through 50 resumes that I get sent as soon as I post a job announcement on one of the big job boards, such as Indeed.

If you are in a leadership role, or you aspire to a leadership role, then at some point in the future you will be hiring. During boom years you might be hiring right now, whereas during a recession your hiring might be off in the distance, but you know at some point in the future you will be hiring. If you want to build teams with the best people you’ve ever met then you need to keep track of those people.

At any given time, there are 50 to a 100 people I’m trying to keep track of, to see if they are happy with their job. I check in with them maybe once or twice a year. These are people who I know are good. The next time I’m hiring, I’m going to reach out to them.

Happily, but also sadly, the best people you know often get jobs they love, which they will not leave to come work for you, therefore you can’t hire them, but you can hire the people they recommend.

Even good people occasionally end up at badly run firms. In some sense, a badly run firm, full of great talent, is a gift to you when you are hiring. If you can get one good person from a failing firm, they will know who else is good, and then you can get several.

As an example of what I mean, during 2021 I served as the Fractional CTO for Pair Eyewear, and during that time Freshly was going through a rough spot. We hired one person from Freshly, and they were terrific. They told us that many other people at Freshly wanted to jump ship. So we ended up eventually hiring nine people from Freshly, and they were all terrific.

I recommend that you occasionally have lunch with the people you know are good, and listen to how they talk about jobs they’ve left. I’m only exaggerating slightly when I say that I’ve had conversations like this with some friends over lunch:

Me: Hi, Sue, Kwan, good to see you. Hey, listen, I'm trying to hire for my tech team. Do you know anyone who might want a job?

Sue: Sorry, I don't know anyone.

Kwan: No. I don't know anyone, either.

Me: You can't recommend anyone at all? Anyone you think is good, or a novice who has ambition? I'm hiring both experienced and junior-level jobs. Backend, frontend, devops, project managers, I need it all.

Kwan: Sorry, man, I can't think of anyone. You should have talked to me three months ago when SugarLoveMusic flamed out. What a freaking disaster. I knew folks then.

Me: What happened at SugarLoveMusic?

Sue: Everything. Everything happened at SugarLoveMusic.

Kwan: Literally everything happened at SugarLoveMusic.

Me: Wow. I remember that you worked there, Kwan, but I didn’t know you worked there, too, Sue.

Sue: For a while. Then I quit. I heard about the final days from Kwan and our friend Beatrice. She was so burned out she took a 90-day vacation. A great devops person, but they had her working 100 hours a week. Everything was chaotic.

Kwan: The CEO was a loser. Such a loser.

Sue: Yes, the CEO was unprofessional, in both his leadership and his handling of money.

Kwan: Such a loser.

Sue: Yes. We kept telling him that we needed clear guidelines about the priorities for the tech team, but he was inconsistent. He said one thing one week and then something very different the next week. He couldn't make up his mind.

Kwan: Such a loser.

Sue: The series A investors promised to put in more money if our CEO could hit certain milestones in terms of monthly subscribers. We could have done it if we'd had better cooperation between the tech team and the marketing team. They needed to run a lot of A/B tests and they needed our help with that. But communication broke down.

Me: Why did communication break down?

Sue: Our CEO kept yelling at Yin Ji, who was our project manager. She was a genius, but she couldn't take all the abuse, and in the end she quit because she just couldn't stand him anymore.

Me: Wow, that's awful. Sounds like the CEO sabotaged the whole startup?

Kwan: Such a loser.

Sue: Yes, one by one, he drove everyone to quit. I think I felt the worst for poor Egan. It was his first job ever. He showed a lot of promise as a frontender, but he was just learning and the stress really got him. He was one of the last to quit. No, wait, he might still be there.

Me: So SugarLoveMusic is still in business? I thought you said it flamed out?

Sue: Well, it ran low on money, and they had to let a lot of people go. The CEO had assumed that investors were going to give him more money, so he was kind of reckless with … well, basically all pecuniary matters.

Me: What an idiot!

Kwan: Loser.

Me: Right, I meant loser.

Sue: I think for the investors, the final straw was when Stratton quit. He was our main backend guy, he knew a lot about file compression. When potential investors heard that Stratton had quit, it was a huge red flag.

Me: It must have been hard for Stratton, too, right? I know how rough it can be to quit suddenly like that, with nothing set up for the future.

Sue: Yeah, and I don't think he had a lot of savings. He had to take some stupid job at a dating app, doing minor tweaks to their database queries, but I don't think he loves it.

Me: No love at the love app?

Sue: He'd swipe left if he could, but he needs the job.

Me: I'm glad you two got away from that place.

Sue: Oh, yes, I'm much happier now. That CEO had really mismanaged the place.

Kwan: Such a —

Me: Loser, yes.

Kwan: I was going to say "thumb biter."

Me: Thumb biter?

Kwan: It’s British.

Me: Oh … are you British?

Kwan: My mother is British.

Me: Right. Well, he sounds like a real thumb biter.

Sue: He was that as well.

Me: So, listen, you two have been a huge help. I'm grateful for all of the recommendations.

Sue: But we didn't recommend anyone.

Me: You said Beatrice is great at devops, Yin Ji is a genius project manager, Egan is a solid junior level frontender, and Stratton is a great backender. That's the team I want to hire.

Sue: Oh, but some of them already have jobs.

Me: Doesn't matter. I might be able to offer them more money, or I can offer them more interesting types of work, or I can offer them flexible hours, or I can offer a work-from-home option, or I can offer to let them work with a technology they'd like to learn — or if they want to go into management, I can offer to mentor them towards the management track. I’ll be creative. I’m confident I can offer them something better than whatever they have now.

Sue: That's probably true. At the very least, you won't scream and yell like our previous CEO.

Kwan: Such a loser.

Me: Thumb biter.

Kwan: Total thumb biter. Except he had really great taste in shoes. I envied his shoes. He bought them in Europe.

Me: Wait …

The point is, if you listen carefully, almost any conversation with friends in the industry will reveal possible sources of discontent in someone's career. Keep track of these people, and keep track of their discontent. The next time you are ready to hire, you'll already have people in mind, people you've already largely decided to hire, based on what you heard from mutual friends and acquaintances.

There is a sense in which terrible CEOs are a gift. So long as they run someone else's company, and not yours, they can provide you with a steady stream of talent, as the best people will be constantly quitting from those firms.