Mariam Naficy Quotes

I love picking people. I started Blackstone, and we had no people, and now we have with our portfolio companies about 750,000 people all over the world. Everybody who is at a senior level has ultimately been picked by me.

Know your core competencies and focus on being great at them. Pay up for people in your core competencies. Get the best. Outside the core competencies, hire people that fit your culture but are cheap.

Yes, I've had some pretty good luck finding wonderful talent.

If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.

Whenever someone leaves, the next person that gets pulled in is somebody with similar values.

The legwork is always hard. Really finding people that you think are good enough. Just the definition of what we have to do is finding good enough people that you really think are special.

Just looking at Onex: We hire almost entirely at the most bottom level and bring them through a nine-year training program. We're probably 70/30 today not requiring an MBA.

Stay externally focused - on your customers - and focus internally when you have to hire.

Tell me who you want to see on the Left, and I'll hire them. If you give me a big name that's out there, that's floating around and wants work, I'd be happy to hire them.

Start-up teams are always in flux, so, like all start-ups, we're always talking to candidates for various key roles.

Hiring's tough. It's not just filtering through hundreds of applications and blocking out big chunks of your day for interviews - those are the simple parts. The difficult thing is the nagging feeling that, despite your best efforts, the perfect candidate will somehow fall through the cracks.

This is a global fight to get the right people in the right place and we're talking about people with PhDs in engineering, computer science, mathematics.

I just want to work with the best people I can get my hands on.

Hire for passion and intensity; there is training for everything else.

If Uber wants to catch up to Google and be the leader in autonomy, we have to have the best minds. We have to have all the great minds.

I want the best people, not just on the banking side but on innovation and technology.

If you want to have the best employees, there really needs to be a vision and a mission. Talent looks for a mission. And if you have the best talent, that's the single biggest competitive advantage any company can have.

I'm into hiring smart guys; I'm into hiring guys who can think at a higher level, that can offer ideas.

Above all else, look around to employ the best talent you possibly can.

I'm the type of employer who will hire based on personality, based on potential. If you put the resume before the personality, you're going to fail.

Pay attention to your culture and your hires from the very beginning.

We recruit for attitude and train for skill.

Good problem-seekers are in higher demand than good problem-solvers.

AirBnB spent 5 months interviewing their first employee, before they hired someone and in their first year, they only hired 2 people.

Part of being able to make great decisions around that and to really grow a business and scale a business, it also comes down to people. I spend a lot of time building teams at both businesses - both The Trump Organization and my own - and thinking about who to hire to supplement the team and allow us to best achieve our goals.