CEOs know that hiring the right people can make a company.
Elon Musk personally interviews candidates himself, to this day, for certain high-profile positions.
SpaceX is hiring big time.
Musk tweeted his company needs engineers, technicians, builders, and essential support
personnel in and around southern Texas - home to its production facility and launch site
for Starship.
He expects to bring in several thousand more people over the next year or two.
But, if you want one of the key jobs, you’ll have to pass muster.
So, what does Musk look for in job candidates?
According to a biography by Ashlee Vance, he’s been known to ask people riddles during
job interviews.
Like this: Imagine if you’re standing on the surface of the Earth.
You walk one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north.
You end up exactly where you started.
Where are you?
One answer is the North Pole.
If you start there and go a mile south, then a mile west and then a mile north, you’ll
make a triangular path and end up back at the North Pole.
But there’s actually more than one answer.
Musk has been known to follow up with: Where else could you be?
The answer is somewhere close to the South Pole.
Imagine a circle with a one-mile circumference.
If you started a mile north of the circle and traveled a mile south, then a mile west
all the way around the circle, then a mile north, you’d be back at your starting point.
Musk is said to care less about whether the person gets the right answer and more about
how they try to solve the problem.
The approach is key as he explained in this interview with a leading German automobile
magazine.
When I interview somebody, I really just ask them to tell me the story of their career,
what are some of the tougher problems that they’ve dealt with, how they’ve dealt
with those, and how they made decisions at key transition points.
Usually, that’s enough for me to get a very good gut feel about someone.
And in order to spot someone who is less than honest, he says he pays attention to whether
they can describe their solution in detail.
Detectives use the same strategy during interrogations.
Honesty helped Sundar Pichai land a job at Google.
When interviewers asked what he thought of Gmail the very same day it launched, he said
he couldn’t answer the question because he hadn’t been able to use the product.
That impressed the interviewers enough to move him to the next rounds.
Just a decade later, he became CEO.
Before even getting a shot at acing an interview, simply getting an interview could be tough.
Musk has questioned whether one of the greatest inventors of all time, Nikola Tesla, would
have even gotten to the interview stage at the company that now bears his name.
The Tesla CEO has even said: This is actually one of my big worries. If Nikola
Tesla was alive today, could he get an interview?
And if not, we're doing something wrong.
And I'm not totally sure he would get an interview.
In order to minimize the chance that brilliant people aren’t overlooked, he says his companies
don’t always focus on the school candidates attended or even if they graduated from university.
O n Tesla’s career page, the requirement to be a software engineer for
its artificial intelligence team is either a Bachelor of Science in an applicable field
or "proof of exceptional skills"
something that Musk has repeated over and over again.
We’re looking just for evidence of exceptional ability.
It’s unclear how many people who lack a degree have actually been hired at Tesla.
But degree or not, “all must pass (a) hardcore coding test”.
Those closest to Musk believe he has a knack for hiring talent.
When he started recruiting for SpaceX in the early 2000s, Musk ended up meeting an engineer
named Tom Mueller through an amateur rocket club in California.
He spoke with Mueller for hours and knew he had struck gold.
Mueller has been called the modern-day godfather of rocket science.
He led the design of SpaceX’s Merlin engines that power the Falcon line of rockets before
he retired last year.
Elon was very good at recognizing talent and hired people that recognized talent.
I feel like my group, Propulsion, was really strong.
Hiring really strong people, train them right, and it’s hard to beat a small group of really
smart people.
But that doesn’t mean Musk is easy to have as a boss.
Headlines have detailed complaints by former employees over difficult
working conditions.
Musk is also said to expect a level of excellence from staff.
Take it from Dolly Singh - the former head of talent acquisition at SpaceX.
When someone on the question-and-answer site Quora asked: What is it like to work with or for
Elon Musk?
She responded:
Working with him isn’t a comfortable experience, he is never satisfied with himself so he is
never really satisfied with anyone around him.
He pushes himself harder and harder and he pushes others around him the exact same way.
The challenge is that he is a machine and the rest of us aren’t.
So if you work for Elon you have to accept the discomfort.
But in that discomfort is the kind of growth you can’t get anywhere else, and worth every
ounce of blood and sweat.
Musk has also given his staff advice on how they can be can be more productive.
He once reportedly sent an email to Tesla staff suggesting they try to avoid holding
too many meetings.
Even saying people should feel free to walk out of a meeting if they’re not adding any
value.
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