How to avoid dumb-sizing!

It was an American marketer from Silicon Valley who first coined the phrase ‘avoid the bozo* explosion’. He meant to say that if you hire one clueless manager in your company, you’re dead! That person will hire more bozos, or clowns. And they’ll hire more and so on.

Steve Jobs, co-founder and chief-executive of Apple Computers, believed the only solution was to do your own recruitment. ‘A players hire A players; B players hire C players.’How do you go about hiring these smart ‘A’ people? Some of the tricks:

Successful projects on a resume have to be checked out. Find out what specific projects the candidate managed personally and analyse those results. The rising tide floats all boats.
Physical appearance influences greatly so check references before actually meeting
Be aware that smart people are not necessarily ‘degreed’ people.
Functional experience is not always an advantage: a candidate who is stuck in her/his way of thinking about an industry can be a problem.
Failure is usually a better teacher than success but obviously avoid candidates linked to a row of failures

And above all: ignore the irrelevant. There is a shortage of ‘A’ players. So don’t fuss over gender, race, age or religion. It often pays off to ignore the perfect background because even that can be irrelevant.

What’s the first thing you look for when hiring? Is there a secret to succesful recruiting?

Bozo the Clown was a clown character very popular in the United States in the 1950s, as a result of widespread franchising in early television.