Lessons From Cloudflare’s Hiring Practices

Recently, the CEO of one of the world’s largest tech companies offered insights into his company’s hiring practices.

Matthew Prince ?is the co-founder of?Cloudflare , a global web infrastructure and website security company with a $31 billion market cap (NYSE: NET). The company’s mission is to build a better Internet.

The company has more than 2,000 employees, and Prince?revealed on Twitter ?that he still sends all job offers to new employees, and he speaks to 25% of job candidates before they’re hired. Additionally, he claims to spend 1/3 of his time on hiring.

For managers at Cloudflare, Prince says the company wants 20% of their time dedicated to hiring. Individual contributors at Cloudflare spend roughly 10% of their time on hiring.

Some other interesting data points from Cloudflare:

• The two characteristics Cloudflare looks for most in job candidates are curiosity and empathy. They value these more than education, experience, GPA, and IQ.
• Cloudflare received more than 200,000 job applications in 2021. They extended 1,455 offers and had a 92% offer acceptance rate.
• To get to those 1,455 offers, Cloudflare spent 23,919 hours interviewing candidates.?

We wrote recently about?how speed in hiring ?is a difference-maker in this job market. Interestingly, Cloudflare takes the opposite approach.?Per Prince , his company’s hiring process is “intentionally slow,” and he claims to be “at least somewhat inflexible on initial compensation.” Their approach to starting compensation,?he says , is because the company knows the least about the person they hire on the day they hire them. So instead, they quickly reward top performers.

Check out Prince’s?entire Twitter thread here .

Curious about how other companies approach hiring and employee retention??Check out this post ?on Goldman Sachs.