How to hire the best people...

Below is the start of an article written by Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape Communications Corporation and internet pioneer. He discusses the rational behind hiring people to build a successful corporation and you may find a few surprises. As someone with both a PhD and an MBA (expected in 2008!) and I confess, a whole bunch of other abbreviations, worthwhile or otherwise, I find the article interesting and enlightening. And, surprise surprise, quite realistic! Enjoy reading it...

How to hire the best people you've ever worked with

There are many aspects to hiring great people, and various people smarter than me have written extensively on the topic.

So I'm not going to try to be comprehensive.

But I am going to relay some lessons learned through hard experience on how to hire the best people you've ever worked with -- particularly for a startup.

I'm going to cover two key areas in this post:

Criteria: what to value when evaluating candidates.

And process: how to actually run the hiring process, and if necessary the aftermath of making a mistake...click here to continue.

PS: Management Accounting exam on Monday went alright but it was just too long. I think 95% of the class did not finish the three questions we had. I guess strawberry picking is not the best preparation mode but the third question was all about joint costing a crude oil refining process and I got too engrossed in the question! I was so interested in the technical details of the question I eventually ran out of time... :-)

Tomorrow, we have our Corporate Finance exam. I am going to analyse a well-known French oil company, fourth largest oil company in the world, as part of my practice. And, it will be useful for my presentation on Monday for the French class. Yes, we have to do presentations in French as part of the compulsory language training course.