Business

Hiring the Perfect Fit

Lesson time 10:33 min

Alexis explains why surrounding yourself with reliable people is more important to your business than having perfect ideas. Learn how to hire wisely, fire quickly, and invest in people who give a damn.

Students give MasterClass an average rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars

Topics include: See Where the Talent Is • Sweat The Early Hires • Relax, You're Not a Psychopath

Alexis Ohanian

Teaches Building Your Startup

Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian teaches you how to turn an idea into a startup. Get the advice he’s shared through his VC fund, Seven Seven Six.

Preview

[MUSIC PLAYING] - For a lot of folks who might be great product creators, great visionaries, great designers, great community builders, they may have no experience whatsoever in hiring or management or any of the other things. And so hiring becomes a skill that a lot of first-time CEOs will need to learn. Unfortunately, I don't have a secret for you. Hiring well, hiring quickly, very hard to do. There is no hack. And it's not just how to hire well. It's also how to source well and how to interview well and then how to onboard well and how to develop talent well. And in an environment like today, where the very best people have all the leverage, you really, really have to make a commitment to doing recruiting and hiring well. People can now work from everywhere. You're not just running off a playbook that we've used for a few years in modern business, when it was a physical office space that everyone showed up at. You're joining hundreds of thousands of other CEOs right now to create a new playbook for how to create culture and develop people in a remote-first world or in a flexible-office world, which is very different. Oftentimes, founders will start with their networks, people they've worked with before, they're high conviction about. Generally speaking, though, you'll run out of amazing people pretty quickly. No offense to your network. I'm sure they're all great. But let's face it, Fred, you know, not the ideal hire. Good guy. Not the top performer you want on the team, right? So what do you do? You will start to find ways to see where the talent is and, frankly, start aggressively reaching out. Things like Twitter have actually become a new kind of resume, because it's a place for people, in their work lives, to talk about the things they care about, to show off the work they're doing, to build an audience, build a following that helps them with a reputation. And you'll find countless people who found their job opportunities through a Twitter DM. And now you're ultimately going to be looking around and saying, okay, but how do we start to build this process? How do we start to understand who we want? And one of the things that I am convinced of is that the job postings of the future are content. No one realized it, because in the past, a job posting was one of millions on monster.com. It was just a note in the void full of millions of other notes that looked just like it saying, here's a job. Here's what we're about. For a role this important, you wouldn't just draft a quick job description, turn it into a paper airplane, and throw it off a building in New York City and hope you find a great person. And that's sort of the equivalent of just tweeting something into the ether today. Instead, you would take time to make the content, the text. You'd be really intentional about actually what you're asking for. You definitely would not ask for a CV, first and foremost, because that's not really relevant. ...

About the Instructor

In 2005, UVA undergrad Alexis Ohanian envisioned a place online where users connect over subcultures—enter Reddit. That was only the start: From growing billion-dollar companies to championing female founders, Ohanian shaped culture. Now he wants to lead tomorrow’s innovators. Learn how to turn an idea into a startup with advice Alexis has shared with other entrepreneurs through his VC fund, Seven Seven Six.

Featured MasterClass Instructor

Alexis Ohanian

Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian teaches you how to turn an idea into a startup. Get the advice he’s shared through his VC fund, Seven Seven Six.

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