Henry Ward (CEO @ Carta) On Hiring

Interview Tip

This is the best LinkedIn post I’ve read on hiring thus far.

It’s authored by Henry Ward, CEO of Carta (then eShares).

It caught a lot of heat before and he just reposted it.

Originally he wrote it in 2015 when they were 35 people.

He said it still applies today - they’re 2,000.

I’m breaking down half of it and pulling out the main points.

Let’s begin.

How do we hire quickly and create a better company (and culture) than we have today?

Henry offers a set of hiring principles + heuristics to provide guard rails.

The hiring heuristics apply to any interviewer.

Hiring Heuristics:

1. Hire for Strength vs Lack of Weakness
2. Hire for Trajectory vs Experience
3. Hire Doers vs Tellers
4. Hire Learners vs Experts
5. Hire Different vs Similar
6. Always pass on ego

Here’s a condensed breakdown of each.

1. Hire for Strength vs Lack of Weakness

The goal of the interview panel is to find out what the candidate is amazing at and to help the hiring manager make a decision.

Do this by looking for strengths during interviews.

Why?

Typically, candidates who are amazing at something will become amazing at others.

Carta hasn’t trained these amazing people yet and Carta is good at training.

2. Hire for Trajectory vs Experience

Our job is not to hire for experience. That’s what everyone else does.

Our job is to hire people whose trajectory will explode when they join Carta, pulling us along with them.

Interviewing for experience is easy because you’re discovering what someone has done.

Interviewing for trajectory is hard because you are predicting what they will do.

The best indicator that someone will have high trajectory is if they value trajectory over experience.

The tell?

They get excited talking about what they can do rather than what they’ve done.

3. Hire Doers vs Tellers

The best predictor of a successful new hire at Carta is if they like to get their hands dirty.

This is true at every level.

Our senior managers are hands-on, care about details, and are not afraid to roll up their sleeves.

They don’t last long otherwise.

A way to find Doers? Ask a candidate how to do something, then ask them to do it.

I ask a Sales rep how they would sell cap table software.

After listening to the answer I ask them to pretend I am a buyer and sell me software.

You can quickly see who prefers doing something versus talking about doing it.

Be wary of seductive Tellers. They tend to be good interviewers.

Interviewing ability has almost no correlation to employee effectiveness.

The most common hiring mistake is hiring good interviewers.

Don’t make that mistake— hire Doers, not Tellers.

4. Hire Learners vs. Experts

This doesn’t mean expertise isn’t important.

We are a company of specialists, not generalists.

Each of us is an expert, or becoming an expert, in our domain.

You cannot be successful at Carta without being an expert at something.

However, the velocity of change at Carta is so high that static expertise quickly becomes obsolete.

To survive and grow we must be a learning organization.

And that means we need people who are awesome at learning.

The clearest signal of a learner is curiosity.

Curious people, by definition, love to learn.

While experts talk about what they know, the curious talk about what they don’t know.

When you interview, verify expertise by discovering strengths. And then look for curiosity.

5. Hire Different vs Similar

There is a deep and natural human bias to hire people “like us.”

Fight this bias.

Hiring similar means we value repeatability and efficiency over creativity and leverage.

Hiring different brings new skills, paradigms, and ideas which are the sparks and tinder of leverage.

They expand our Venn diagram rather than contract it.

I can’t stress this enough. You will naturally want to hire people you “connect” with.

Fight your instincts. Hire Different.

6. Always Pass On Ego

Confidence and ego are opposites.

Modesty and humility are traits of the strong.

Ego and arrogance is a disease of the weak and insecure.

The truly confident don’t need people to know they are great. They are happy to know it themselves.

And the truly Great use their greatness to make those around them greater.

Most companies have a no-assholes rule. We do too.

But there are many people who would pass the asshole test but not the ego test. And ego is the far more dangerous disease.

I would rather hire the humble asshole than the arrogant nice guy.

The good news is egos and assholes are highly correlated. But not always. There are nice people with huge egos.

They just disguise it well. Your job as the interviewer is to figure that out.

Always pass on ego. Always.