Recruiting Amazing Talent with Merit, Excellence and Intelligence
Building a business isn’t easy. Even the most successful companies, at one or two points in their history, required every bit of effort, margin, and contribution at the table just to barely squeak by.
It follows that the #1 input metric for any business is the talent that it recruits and hires.
When I think about the new company I’m going to start, it brings this input metric into sharp focus. We will be in the business of building transformational software designed for rapid adoption by a large volume of customers.
This is not a simple undertaking, and requires excellence in software engineering, product design, marketing, operational rigor, and strategic agility as we respond to market feedback.
We will make hundreds of hiring decisions over the next couple of years, and that collective set of decisions will be upstream of 100% of our success.
The framework we used at Riskalyze now has an emerging name, and I like it. People are starting to call it MEI, for Merit, Excellence, and Intelligence.
- Merit means hiring only the best person for the job.
- Excellence means constantly raising the bar and expecting excellence from each person you hire.
- Intelligence means unapologetically preferring people who are very smart.
We need to judge people by their talent, work ethic, skills, potential, and the content of their character. We need to consistently treat them as individuals, and never unfairly stereotype or tokenize them.
No demographic group has a monopoly on excellence or intelligence. Thus, a recruiting process based on merit casts the widest net for talent, proactively includes classically underrepresented individuals, and objectively selects the best candidate.
And you know the best part? If you follow this framework, everyone who joins your company will be confident they were chosen for their outstanding talent, and their talent alone.
Embracing meritocracy is the right and fair thing to do for our employees; delivers excellence to our customers; is wildly profitable for our shareholders; and is therefore the best thing for the world.
It’s time for the world’s best companies to embrace MEI.
Thank you to Scale AI for planting the new name of this framework into the world.
