From the March 30, 2014 New York Times and the Corner Office column by Adam Bryant
and his interview with Tom Erickson, chief executive of Acquia,
an open-source software company
How
do you hire?
I ask the person
to tell me what they want to do, and what inspires them. When they have free
time, what do they choose to do? How do they work with others in difficult
situations? If you’ve had to fire people, how did you do that? How do they
think about leadership, and how do they think that’s sustained?
In a fast-growth
company like ours, you may come in with only one or two people reporting to
you, even though you had 500 or 800 reporting to you in previous jobs. How are
you going to deal with that? Your leadership skills and ability to influence
people are much more important than your need to have direct lines of
authority.
I also use a lot
of behavioral interviewing techniques. I do believe that what people did
previously is likely to be what they’ll do in the future.
What else
do you look for?
One thing I
preach a lot about is the importance of “ready, fire, aim.” There are people in
the world who are ready-aim-fire types. If I sense from an interview that they
are a ready-aim-fire person, I’ll tell them: “I don’t think this is the right
place for you. You need to be in a place where precision matters and the
ability to get the right answer will be valued. Because those won’t be valued
here.”
How do
you figure that out?
If it’s a
college student, I’ll listen to the way they talk about their studies. How
meticulous do they feel they need to be? If they’ve had other jobs, you can get
a sense of where they were comfortable and where they weren’t comfortable. Some
people are just very set in their ways.
I’m looking for
people who are going to jump in and own their work, who are going to risk
something, and risk failing. So you can ask questions about how often someone’s
failed or how comfortable they are about failure. Then you decide, “Is this
going to be a ready-aim-fire person or a ready-fire-aim person?” Because if you
don’t accept failure from an emotional perspective, then you’d be a bad fit for
us.