Reading the biography of Amazon.com’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, I came across this quote on hiring:

“One of [Jeff’s] mottos was that every time we hired someone, he or she would raise the bar for the next hire, so that the overall talent pool was always improving,” said Nicholas Lovejoy, who joined Amazon in 1995 as the fifth employee. Bezos put the philosophy this way: Five years after an employee was hired, he said, that employee should think, “I’m glad that I got hired when I did, because I wouldn’t get hired now.”

I thought this is a terrific approach to hiring. At first, it seemed to conflict with some common advice about hiring only A-players. How could you hire better people in the future if you already were hiring the best?

I realized the way to reconcile these bits of advice is that there are A-players for different stages of the company and also some A-players who can scale across stages. Hiring people who will do a great job at the current scale and have the potential to punch above their weight class can still leave room for “even better” future hires who come from even larger scale organizations where they succeeded. In spite of how far I’ve taken my company, PaperG, from its inception, I am still in awe of outside executives interested in working with us who have far more experience and success to date from their times operating much larger companies. 

PaperG is in the midst of a mini-hiring spree (expanding the team by about 20% in a month) to help us as we scale the business to enable some of the largest media companies go after one of the most exciting markets, local advertising. In some open positions, we just need to compare whether the new hire is much better than someone already in a similar position.

In other open positions, we have to think whether the new hire will be doing a better job than a founder could if he did it full-time. It’s a high bar —  but even founders should want to feel lucky they were the ones to start the company and not be the ones who are applying for the competitive position.