CEOs know that hiring the right people can make a company. Elon Musk personally interviews candidates himself,
to this day, for certain high-profile positions. SpaceX is hiring big time. Musk tweeted his company needs engineers,
technicians, builders, and essential support personnel in and around southern Texas - home
to its production facility and launch site for Starship. He expects to bring in several thousand more
people over the next year or two. But, if you want one of the key jobs, you’ll
have to pass muster. So, what does Musk look for in job candidates? According to a biography by Ashlee Vance,
he’s been known to ask people riddles during job interviews. Like this: Imagine if you’re standing on the
surface of the Earth. You walk one mile south, one mile west, and
one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you? One answer is the North Pole. If you start there and go a mile south, then
a mile west and then a mile north, you’ll make a triangular path and end up back at
the North Pole. But there’s actually more than one answer. Musk has been known to follow up with: Where else could you be? The answer is somewhere close to the South Pole. Imagine a circle with a one-mile circumference. If you started a mile north of the circle
and traveled a mile south, then a mile west all the way around the circle, then a mile
north, you’d be back at your starting point. Musk is said to care less about whether the
person gets the right answer and more about how they try to solve the problem. The approach is key as he explained in this
interview with a leading German automobile magazine. When I interview somebody, I really just ask
them to tell me the story of their career, what are some of the tougher problems that
they’ve dealt with, how they’ve dealt with those, and how they made decisions at
key transition points. Usually, that’s enough for me to get
a very good gut feel about someone. And in order to spot someone who is less than
honest, he says he pays attention to whether they can describe their solution in detail. Detectives use the same strategy during interrogations. Honesty helped Sundar Pichai land a job at
Google. When interviewers asked what he thought of
Gmail the very same day it launched, he said he couldn’t answer the question because
he hadn’t been able to use the product. That impressed the interviewers enough to
move him to the next rounds. Just a decade later, he became CEO. Before even getting a shot at acing an interview,
simply getting an interview could be tough. Musk has questioned whether one of the greatest
inventors of all time, Nikola Tesla, would have even gotten to the interview stage at
the company that now bears his name. The Tesla CEO has even said: This is actually
one of my big worries. If Nikola Tesla was alive today, could he get an interview? And if not, we're doing something wrong. And I'm not totally sure he would get an interview. In order to minimize the chance that brilliant
people aren’t overlooked, he says his companies don’t always focus on the school candidates
attended or even if they graduated from university. O n Tesla’s career page, the
requirement to be a software engineer for its artificial intelligence team is either
a Bachelor of Science in an applicable field or "proof of exceptional skills" something that Musk has repeated over and
over again. We’re looking just for evidence of exceptional
ability. It’s unclear how many people who lack a
degree have actually been hired at Tesla. But degree or not, “all must pass (a) hardcore
coding test”. Those closest to Musk believe he has a knack
for hiring talent. When he started recruiting for SpaceX in the early 2000s, Musk ended up meeting an engineer named Tom Mueller through an amateur rocket
club in California. He spoke with Mueller for hours and knew
he had struck gold. Mueller has been called the modern-day godfather
of rocket science. He led the design of SpaceX’s Merlin engines
that power the Falcon line of rockets before he retired last year. Elon was very good at recognizing talent and
hired people that recognized talent. I feel like my group, Propulsion, was really strong. Hiring really strong people, train them right,
and it’s hard to beat a small group of really smart people. But that doesn’t mean Musk is easy to have
as a boss. Headlines have detailed
complaints by former employees over difficult working conditions. Musk is also said to expect a level of excellence
from staff. Take it from Dolly Singh - the former head
of talent acquisition at SpaceX. When someone on the question-and-answer site
Quora asked: What is it like to work with or for Elon Musk? She responded: Working with him isn’t a comfortable experience,
he is never satisfied with himself so he is never really satisfied with anyone around
him. He pushes himself harder and harder and he
pushes others around him the exact same way. The challenge is that he is a machine and
the rest of us aren’t. So if you work for Elon you have to accept
the discomfort. But in that discomfort is the kind of growth
you can’t get anywhere else, and worth every ounce of blood and sweat. Musk has also given his staff advice on how they can be
can be more productive. He once reportedly sent an email to Tesla
staff suggesting they try to avoid holding too many meetings. Even saying people should feel free to walk
out of a meeting if they’re not adding any value. Whether you're employed at Tesla or any company,
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