Hire Someone You Would Work For

Zuckerberg said this at a public Q&A at the Liceu theater in Barcelona on March 4, 2015, when someone asked how Facebook attracts and selects the right people. He said there is always more work than people to do it, which tempts a company to hire people who are not the very best, so it needs “a check in place so that you only really hire the best people.” This rule is his check. He named Sheryl Sandberg, then Facebook’s chief operating officer, as someone who passes it.

Later in the Q&A he said that in a big organization the rule “also works many layers down”: if each person hires only direct reports they would be willing to work for, “you’re probably going to get a pretty strong organization.”

Guy Kawasaki, who worked with Steve Jobs at Apple, described what happens when that chain runs the other way. In a 2011 blog post on what he learned from Jobs, he wrote that Jobs believed “A players hire A players,” and added that “B players hire C players so they can feel superior to them, and C players hire D players.” Start hiring B players, Kawasaki warned, and expect what Jobs called “the bozo explosion.”