What Elon Musk Looks for When He Hires
There’s no need to have a college degree at all
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An NYT report says Elon Musk plans to hire 3,600 new employees at Twitter by 2025, create a secretive new product known as “X,” and quadruple the size of its user base.
But it is impossible to make a great product without hiring great people. And this got me thinking about the hiring strategy of Elon Musk.
We all know that Musk gets involved in the hiring process for the key positions in his companies (Tesla and SpaceX) to make sure that he hires the best people.
So, let’s find out what Elon Musk looks for in a job candidate.
In the book “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” Ashlee Vance talked about Musk’s hiring process. He wrote —
“Like many tech companies, SpaceX subjects potential hires to a gauntlet of interviews and tests. Some of the interviews are easygoing chats in which both parties get to feel each other out; others are filled with quizzes that can be quite hard. Engineers tend to face the most rigorous interrogations, although business types and salesmen are made to suffer, too. Coders who expect to pass through standard challenges have rude awakenings. Companies will typically challenge software developers on the spot by asking them to solve problems that require a couple of dozen lines of code. The standard SpaceX problem requires five hundred or more lines of code. All potential employees who make their way to the end of the interview process then handle one more task. They’re asked to write an essay for Musk about why they want to work at SpaceX.”
Vance added, “The reward for solving the puzzles, acting clever in interviews, and penning up a good essay is a meeting with Musk.”
Believe it or not — Elon Musk interviewed almost every one of SpaceX’s first one thousand employees, including the janitors and technicians. Even now, he continues to interview engineers for SpaceX and Tesla.
The interview with Elon Musk could last anywhere between thirty seconds to fifteen minutes. During the initial part of the interview, Musk doesn't speak much. He generally keeps on writing emails or doing his work. Eventually, he turns around and faces the candidate to ask one question or a few.
What type of questions??
Vance wrote in his book that Elon loves to start with riddles.
“You can be sure, though, that he will roll out the Riddle: “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?” Vance explained.
Musk uses the riddle to know how the candidate approaches solving it. He doesn’t care about the right answer, but he is very much interested in the problem-solving approach of the candidate.
Musk said on numerous occasions that he wants to know how people solve critical problems. That’s why, in the interviews, he asks candidates to share their problem-solving stories.
“When I interview somebody, I really just ask them to tell me about 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,” Musk explained in an interview.
While the candidate describes the story, Musk carefully takes note of the detail and tries to understand what type of person he/she is. For Musk, that’s enough to get a very good gut feel about someone.
Musk focuses so much on the problem-solving ability of a candidate that he doesn’t care if the candidate has a good college degree or not. Instead, he depends on the “proof of exceptional skills.”
When asked whether college or university degrees are required to get a job in Elon’s companies, he said, “There is no need even to have a college degree at all.”
Musk believes that skills matter more than degrees. He further added—
“If somebody graduated from a great university that may be an indication that they will be capable of great things but it’s not necessarily the case. If you look at say people like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs — these guys didn’t graduate from college. But if you had a chance to hire them, of course, that would be a good idea.”
According to Musk, two things are important. One is — the evidence of exceptional ability, and the other is — a track record of exceptional achievement.
If any candidate has these two things, then he/she has a future in Musk’s company.
It is worth mentioning that the turnover rate in Musk’s companies, especially SpaceX, is relatively high.
Many of the new employees quit within the first few months due to extreme work pressure (ninety-plus-hour workweeks) and the executive’s straightforward attitude.
“Elon doesn’t know about you and he hasn’t thought through whether or not something is going to hurt your feelings,” Dolly Singh, who spent five years as the head of talent acquisition at SpaceX, said. “He just knows what the fuck he wants done. People who did not normalize to his communication style did not do well.”
So, anyone who wants to work with Elon Musk must possess exceptional problem-solving ability and a track record of exceptional achievement, and, of course, he/she must be extremely hard working.
Thank you for reading.
Sources: Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance, INSIDER, Inc., New York Times.
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