Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2015. Dolly Singh’s role as former head of talent at SpaceX and the description of Pinkberry are as of 2015.
Elon Musk is one of those people who like to operate at the level of excellence. For him, good is mediocre, and excellent is good. (See: What it’s like to work with Elon Musk.)
His obsession is changing the world, and to do that he needs to hire the best. Musk’s recruiting strategy is very simple: hire the best person possible, whether it is an engineer to build a rocket or someone to serve ice cream at the company.
Dolly Singh, SpaceX’s former head of talent, says that when they started building an in-house café at SpaceX, Musk told her to go out and find the best frozen yogurt maker. Musk’s exact words were: “Go to Pinkberry and bring me the employee of the month. I want to hire the employee of the month.”
Pinkberry is a chain of shops and franchises with a reputation for serving the best smoothies, frozen yogurt and yogurt cakes in all of North America. It pays its employees well, so it only hires excellent people. And of all those excellent people, Musk wanted the best.
Singh says, according to Business Insider, that she and another recruiter went out and toured several shops, and in the end they hired an employee on one of those visits.
Madness or an excellent way to hire?
Musk has a very simple question for candidates who want to join his company: “Of all the people in the world, of the millions of candidates who could do this job, convince me that you are the one I need.”
For Musk, whether a job is considered vital to the company’s survival is very relative. Whether you are the cook, the cleaner or the secretary, your work matters to the company. Having a company culture where only the best is hired, not the cheapest, spreads excellence to every level of the organisation.
Remember that Bill Ackman also had a very particular way of hiring talent, which led him to hire a tour guide and a taxi driver for his firm simply because they were passionate and talented at finance. Ackman did not want people with degrees; he wanted talented employees.
