Leading Apple With Steve Jobs: Management Lessons From a Controversial Genius

Chapter 5

Unusual Interviewing Techniques

Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes . . . because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.

—Apple Ad

Recruiting should never be an effort just of the human resources people. Hiring should be a collaborative process, and it should be based on a culture that is focused on finding the A-players. A candidate should speak with at least a dozen people in several areas of the company, not just those in the area that he or she would work in. That way your prospective A-employees get broad exposure to the needs and activities of other parts of the company.

Steve completely revised my ideas on the subject of job interviews. My understanding of what he was doing began when I thought back over our first conversation in the restaurant that shifted into a Steve Jobs version of an employment interview. I call it a Steve Jobs version because he had a unique way of interviewing that was less of an interview and more of a conversation. Instead I was getting my first taste of his highly personal interviewing style, which I would come to recognize as a basic underlying element—possibly the most important element—in assembling the teams that through the years enabled him to turn out that incredible stream of phenomenal, paradigm-changing, gotta-have products.

Once I became an Apple employee, Steve often asked me, as VP of human resources, ...