Executive Hiring Quotes

Any slots at the senior level, including CEO or other slots, will be filled internally.

When a company seeks a new chief executive officer, or a university a new vice-chancellor, enormous trouble is taken to find the best person.

Deciding whether or not to bring in an outside CEO is one of the most gut-wrenching decisions that a founder will ever need to make.

I do interview senior candidates at the home office or many of our hotel or restaurant General Manager candidates. My two favorite questions are "Tell me about a failure in your career, what you learned from it, and how you've leveraged this lesson" and "All of us are misperceived at one time or another. What's the most common way you're misperceived in the workplace and why?" Both of these questions require a certain amount of self-awareness and a willingness to not give pat, normal answers that we offer experience in interviews.

The classic problem as an entrepreneur is that they have a hard time delegating. But that's really crazy. Recruiting other executives is critical, so is dealing with customers and dealing with regulators. Those are functions that only the top founders can do.

Accountability is a two way street. We can't just make it easier for us to fire people; we must make it easier for us to hire people. It takes VA an average of 240 days to complete the hiring process for executives joining VA from outside government. We are losing talented people because it simply takes too long.

As a company grows from 25 to 50 to 100 to 200 to 500 to 1000 people, the characteristics of who is the very best talent in leadership roles will change. It's rarely the case that your leadership team at 1000 people is the same leadership team you had a 25 people.

I know a lot of CEOs who are looking for three- to four-year varsity athletes - not necessarily because these people are going to be doing pushups or spiking volleyballs in the workplace, but because they're looking for that continuity, that person who was gritty about something.

A lot of what I do is running businesses rather than buying stocks. My worst decision is probably when I know I have the wrong chief executive running the business, and I keep on waiting to make the difficult decision of replacing him.

There's a bias on hiring the best engineers wherever they come from. It does seem like a lot of the non-engineering execs come from Ivy League schools, as is true in much of corporate America and government.