Hiring Quotes

Resources are hired to give results, not reasons.

We can never fall short when it comes to recruiting, hiring, maintaining and growing our workforce. It is the employees who make our organization’s success a reality.

Supercomputer pioneer Seymour Cray used to deliberately hire for inexperience because it brought him people who "do not usually know what's supposed to be impossible.

You hire the best people you can possibly find. Then it's up to you to create an environment where great people decide to stay and invest their time.

If you make a hiring mistake, make the change quickly. Don’t ignore problems. Don’t assume it will get better.

Favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly wrong, especially in high tech. The world is changing so fast across every industry and endeavor that it's a given the role for which you're hiring is going to change. Yesterday's widget will be obsolete tomorrow, and hiring a specialist in such a dynamic environment can backfire. A specialist brings an inherent bias to solving problems that spawns from the very expertise that is his putative advantage, and may be threatened by a new type of solution that requires new expertise. A smart generalist doesn't have bias, so is free to survey the wide range of solutions and gravitate to the best one.

If we agree that the education, employment and retirement continuum is no longer a linear “cradle to grave” construct, then several tools for managing this reality are increasingly proving redundant. Job descriptions used for hiring are one such example. Hiring managers often write these as a reflection of their own experiences, ignoring the fact that we are entering an era where the emphasis should be less on ready competence and more on transferable skills.

The men at the top aren't that great at properly assessing the women under them, certainly not enough to gauge their potential or intestinal fortitude.

He always said that when you are hiring someone, look at the quality of the person. It is very easy to find a good technician; it's much harder and more important to have a good person. ~ Robert Drouhin repeating what his father Maurice told him

You may be thinking that your company has a human resources person who will keep you out of trouble. This is a dangerous misconception. Whether your company has a massive Human Resources Department with hundreds of representatives or a small office with just a single representative, these HR reps are not your advocates. They work for the company, not for you.

Dating and hiring have a lot in common.

Don't hire anyone you wouldn't want to run into in the hallway at three in the morning.

If you can 'hire tough,' you can 'manage easy.

I’m a firm believer that most people who do great things are doing them for the first time. Returning to my theory of hiring, I’d rather have someone all fired up to do something for the first time than someone who’s done it before and isn’t that excited to do it again. You rarely go wrong giving someone who is high potential the shot.