Hire Great People Fast

HIRE GREAT PEOPLE FAST. By Bill Birchard

Lessons from Netscape, Cisco, and Yahoo! On how to find the right people and get them up to speed – fast.

Jim Barksdale, CEO of Netscape Communications, is standing before 50 new recruits at an orientation session. He's a congenial guy with a wry sense of humor. He's old enough to be the father of many people in the room, which is precisely what he doesn't want to be. First he asks a question: "What's the purpose of this business? "To make money," replies one new employee. "Wrong!" Barksdale snaps. "Our purpose is to create and keep customers. Somehow each of you has to be a part of that purpose." Next he sets goals: Netscape wants to land 200 new corporate accounts by the end of the quarter, to deliver its software on time all the time, and to double revenues every year. Then he does some attitude adjustment: "We are not a family at Netscape," he insists. "That would put a lot of pressure on me. It would mean I'm the dad." Think of Netscape as a basketball team, he suggests, opportunistic on offense, tenacious on defense. "Then I can be the coach." The coach runs through a set of hand signals, the last one being fists punched skyward. Then he leads a group cheer: "NETSCAPE! EVERYWHERE! TEAM! FIGHT!" What's happening today on the Netscape campus in Mountain View, California happens every day in fast-growing companies around the country. The scarcest commodity in business is not customers or technology capital. It's people. More and more companies simply can't recruit great people fast enough. This talent shortage is their biggest obstacle to growth; solving it is their biggest strategic priority. Barksdale's company focuses relentlessly on acquiring talent. Netscape has distributed more product (at last count, 60 million copies of its Web browser) and generated more revenue than any software startup in history. Which means it has to keep adding people at a ferocious pace. Netscape was founded in February 1994 with 2...