Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes . . . because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.
—Apple Ad
Recruiting should never be an effort just of the human resources people. Hiring should be a collaborative process, and it should be based on a culture that is focused on finding the A-players. A candidate should speak with at least a dozen people in several areas of the company, not just those in the area that he or she would work in. That way your prospective A-employees get broad exposure to the needs and activities of other parts of the company.
Steve completely revised my ideas on the subject of job interviews. My understanding of what he was doing began when I thought back over our first conversation in the restaurant that shifted into a Steve Jobs version of an employment interview. I call it a Steve Jobs version because he had a unique way of interviewing that was less of an interview and more of a conversation. Instead I was getting my first taste of his highly personal interviewing style, which I would come to recognize as a basic underlying element—possibly the most important element—in assembling the teams that through the years enabled him to turn out that incredible stream of phenomenal, paradigm-changing, gotta-have products.
Once I became an Apple employee, Steve often asked me, as VP of human resources, to have a conversation with candidates after they had finished talking to him. Many of those people told me that their session with Steve hadn’t seemed like an interview. No wonder. They have been served up a taste of the Steve Jobs non-interview.
So you have a promising candidate coming in. How are you going to conduct the interview? Here are some pointers of the Steve Jobs technique.
First of all, he was never much interested in a person’s résumé. A résumé only speaks to what the person has achieved in the past. Instead, Steve most of all wanted to know about the candidates, What can they bring to this project? What is the talent they bring? What do I see that says they can go beyond?
One of the challenges was that Steve, as you very likely know, was inordinately secretive about Apple’s projects. He might be looking for someone who would be able to, say, solve some thorny problems about the antenna for a proposed cell phone that no one even guessed Apple might be working on. He might say something like, “Let me tell you where we’re trying to go,” or “Let me show you something I’m thinking about,” and pull out something as seemingly unimportant as a piece of plastic with a new color on it. He was always very interested in the getting other people’s reaction to physical design.
Or it might be, “What do you think of the design of my watch?” I always knew that if the applicant left with a new watch like Steve’s, it meant the person had recognized the beauty of the design, and Steve had rewarded his good taste by reaching into the box in his desk and presenting the person with a duplicate of his own as a gift. Those watches cost something like $2,000, but Steve gave duplicates away to anyone who recognized the excellence of the design.
Steve wouldn’t ask if you had some ideas that might be of value or some crucial talents that might be helpful. He would just leave the door open to see if you came forth with anything that made sense. That’s why people came away feeling they had had a conversation with him instead of having been interviewed: He didn’t ask, “What can you do for me?” He just gave people the opportunity to speak up, so he could judge whether it sounded as if they could offer a contribution to the project and the team.
The unspoken questions were, “What is the talent you bring?” and “What do I see that says you can go beyond and become a valuable contributor, an innovator?”
I met a man years later who had been interviewed by Steve, who complained to me at the time about the way he had been treated. It turned out that he had gotten off on the wrong foot right from the start by showing up in a three-piece business suit—revealing at a glance that he hadn’t taken the trouble to find out anything about the Apple culture. Then the man wanted to show Steve a piece of work he was proud of, which he had brought with him on his computer. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a Dell laptop. The interview was over the instant Steve saw the Dell.
One other element about Steve’s conversations with job candidates: he wanted to get a sense of whether the person would be honest with him. As he explained to me once, “If there’s bad news, will they have the guts to tell me, or will they try to hide it?”
In that first restaurant conversation, Steve asked a question that is definitely not the kind of thing people who observe the ordinary social graces would ever ask a complete stranger: “Jay, have you ever been fired?”
I laughed. “No,” I said. “But I once anticipated being fired and quit to avoid it. I had been hired by a radio station as a disc jockey, and it wasn’t a very good match for my talents, clearly not what the station was looking for. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that they weren’t going to keep me around, so I walked into the owner’s office and told him I was quitting. He said, ‘Thanks. You just saved yourself from being fired!’ ”
Steve got a kick out of the story. I would discover later that he didn’t really care whether a person he was interviewing had ever been fired. He asked the question because he wanted to see the reaction: Would the person be embarrassed? Caught off guard? Stumped about whether or not to tell the truth? The reaction told him a lot more about candidates than what they actually said.
Candidates who survived those early parts of the interview with Steve then got the Steve Jobs sales pitch. He would lay out his vision with such enthusiasm and passion that it would be hard to say no.
When he could do it without compromising secrecy, he would sometimes show a prototype of some component that didn’t give anything away. On one occasion, after he had left Apple and started NeXT Computers, he was talking to an Apple employee he wanted to recruit for NeXT. He waxed poetic about this groundbreaking personal computer he and his teams were designing—and then showed off one state-of-the-art item. In fact, it was nothing more than a length of cable, but it was a cable that had been designed especially for the NeXT, to Steve’s very demanding standard. He displayed it with the reverence and awe that someone else might have lavished on a Rembrandt painting. Still, that innocuous cable was as much of the computer as Steve was willing to show, even to this trusted Apple employee he knew personally and was so eager to recruit.
Why bother showing something as essentially insignificant as a piece of cable? Because, again, he was looking for the reaction.
If I had been asked, “How should I let Mr. Jobs know I really want to work for him?” I would have answered, “Don’t mask your enthusiasm. If you see or hear something that gets you excited, let him see it.”
I’ve followed that principle in my own interviewing ever since, often hiring people who would not have passed muster based on their résumés but who turned out to be brilliant choices. The trick is to give people the opportunity to show what they care about, what excites them. Remember, sometimes it’s not what they say but how they react that is the critical element in deciding whether you want them on your team.
In my case, once I had agreed to take the job at Apple, Steve laid out two tests for me. One involved the Apple II computer he had sent to me. It was a good thing I was curious enough to sit right down and learn how to use it. The day I arrived, he already expected me to be proficient.
The other test was the visit to Xerox PARC I described in my previous book. He didn’t tell me where we were headed but as he drove us there, with the music blaring, he asked what I thought of the Apple II and where I thought computers were going.
Again he was giving himself an opportunity to judge my reaction. He wanted to find out whether I shared his worldview about computers. I told him I found the Apple II exciting but that I was sure future machines could be made much easier to learn and to use.
This part of the probing had actually begun in our original conversation, and I would come to recognize it as a standard part of his routine with job candidates. “How do you like the Apple products?” he had asked. Since I had never seen an Apple product, much less used one, I told him I had to answer based on what I had seen—some IBM products in the development lab, the PC prototype Intel was working on, and the Osborne computer I had used at Intel. My experience was limited but, I told him, it seemed you almost had to be a programmer to use the products. The user interface was very technical. In addition, most people (back then) had a fear of computers. The word itself, based on IBM’s positioning of the computer market, brought a sense of remote awe and discomfort. I said, “If people had felt that way about the telephone, we’d still be communicating by mail.” Steve smiled in appreciation.
He had opened the door with his question. I had given him just the kind of reaction he was looking for.
For some positions, you need people with spirit, yet the job is the equivalent of working in the galley. A prime example: hiring people to work in the Apple retail stores.
Working in an Apple store is a coveted position, more sought after than you might imagine: Only about 6 percent of the applicants are chosen. Candidates frequently try to find out how to prepare themselves so they can ace the personal interview. In fact, it’s not something a person can prepare for, because it’s about attitude, work ethic, and being a team player. And, as well, having passion for the products, having a collaborative spirit, and paying great attention to details. The recruiting process Apple uses is completely different from a job at the company headquarters in Cupertino. Some applicants have been interviewed on a bench in the mall, in a coffee shop, or at an outdoor restaurant.
Another company that has also done a great job of recruiting people to fit their culture is Starbucks. As they grew, the headquarters staff increased from 100 employees to 1,000. On the front lines, they were faced with even a bigger challenge: how to hire over 100,000 new employees without losing their existing culture, which has always been based on the people behind the counter being able to make a connection with the customer. Starbucks senior vice president Dave Olson described their culture by saying that it didn’t matter how many millions or billions of coffees the company served, if a single customer received one that didn’t suit him/her, the staff had to be able to perform automatically to address it and make sure the customer was satisfied.
Steve believed from the first that you could not rely on outside recruiting firms to select people who would be a good fit for the Apple culture.
Talking to Fortune senior editor Betsy Morris in 2008, Steve told her that rather than using outside search firms, Apple did its own talent searching. “Recruiting is hard,” he told her. “It’s just finding the needles in the haystack. We do it ourselves and we spend a lot of time at it.”
For Steve, this wasn’t just a now-and-then task that he found time for when things were slow. “I’ve participated in the hiring of maybe 5,000-plus people in my life—so I take it very seriously. You can’t know enough in a one-hour interview.”
It’s the talent of sizing up whether the person is a truly good fit for the culture that Steve developed and nurtured. “In the end,” he said in the Fortune interview, “it’s ultimately based on your gut. ‘How do I feel about this person? What are they like when they’re challenged? Why are they here?’ I ask everybody that: ‘Why are you here?’ ”
He finished with a statement that sums up the essence of what I think of as the Steve Jobs culture standard: “The answers themselves are not what you’re looking for. It’s the meta-data”—by which he meant the information you draw from the data.1
In the end, the most important element in creating a Pirate organization is choosing the right people, and the most important element in choosing the right people is being able to recognize the values and qualities of Pirates when you see them.
That means you have to know who you are as an organization, you have to have a clear product vision, and you have to have a clear sense of the culture you’re trying to create. Steve was describing the culture of innovation when he said that “Apple runs like a start-up.” He meant that the company has small teams of Pirates working with a tight focus on one important project at a time.
I once asked an old Apple friend what he missed most about Apple after he left. He answered, “A CEO and executive team with great vision and a great ability to communicate direction that ripples down through the company.” That’s as good a definition as any of the Pirate organization.
Notes
1. Steve Jobs, “Steve Jobs Speaks Out,” an interview with Senior Editor Betsy Morris, Fortune, August 3, 2008.
2. Eric Gelman et al, “Showdown in Silicon Valley,” Newsweek, September 30, 1985, 47–50.