Hiring for Person

We’re living in an era of rapid change, change is happening all around us and especially so in tech where change happens frequently. So, having high performance teams is critical. You have assembled a lot of teams throughout your career. What's your strategy for selecting new team members?

So, right now and for the last 10, 15 years in Silicon Valley, finding talent, I think it's the biggest strategic problem that every company faces. There are so many companies looking for that great talent and they're looking for diverse talent. I'm thrilled that the diversity is not something that just a single company is looking at, all companies across the globe are really focused on diversity. So, that puts even more pressure on finding those individuals for your organization. So, we go through very similar processes to everyone else. You go out to your network and you say, I'm looking for referrals, please, please, please. You post on LinkedIn. In a lot of cases you use executive recruiters and then really what it comes down to is finding those individuals that bring the diversity that is experience-based that's going to add to the team that you already have in place. Oftentimes I'm hiring for the person, I'll figure out the job around the person. So maybe having the flexibility of not saying okay, so it’s this job, with these parameters, to find the right person. I was looking for a chief information security officer at DocuSign for over a year. It was a really, I mean, security's a very competitive field. It's extraordinarily difficult to find great talent in those areas. And so I had been looking for over a year, which also means you can't compromise. You have to hold out until you find the right person and ended up finding a woman for this position. I interviewed probably 50 people, only two of them had been women. And so, finding that individual who brought just the right background and experience and she is doing fantastic. But the job was defined like this when I was talking to her and she was like, well, you know, I actually am not interested in this, but this actually is something that I could get excited about. So, I made that happen because I think it's important that you find the right person and then you find the job to surround that person with.