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.
领英推荐
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.
Startup Advisor & Investor | Entrepreneur | CMO | Educator
1 个月This!! ?? ?? in my humble opinion, DEI became a crutch not a catalyst. Love the idea of MEI as a handle but may I suggest that INTELLIGENCE is both self awareness and external recognition of an individual’s specific capabilities that are both meritorious AND raise excellence for all around them. In other words, intelligence is people maximizing their own potential with the acknowledgement and help of others (their managers/mentors) in what they’re really good at.
Storytelling Coach ?? Helping tech founders fast-track their growth with Storytelling
1 个月Embracing Multicultural, Ethnic, and Inclusive (MEI) talent is both ethical and strategic. Diverse perspectives drive innovation and give companies a competitive edge in a global market.
I Help High-Net-Worth Investors Align Their Wealth Seamlessly With Personal Goals & Aspirations ?? | Wealth Management ?? | Ex $150B Global Asset Partner | ?? Economics Ph.D.
1 个月You're a good man for putting out your first stab here Aaron. Courageous and empathetic discussions will be needed to move us forward. Not talking past each other. Well done.
CEO at Softlab360 | Engineering Ideas with Fintech and AI
1 个月Yes, cheers to all of us who have gone through founding and building a business through setbacks and recoveries and kept a team! We would have and have arrived at this conclusion.
Founder of the ETF Business Review and FPR
1 个月if you look at the children olympics for math and science China, Russia and Eastern Europe regularly beat the rest of the world. Adding to them should go North America and India and then everything else does not have that much chance. In reality the world is super concentrated, and the truly talented people are so very few. Pareto 80/20 may be even too broad. The intelligent and excellent people are super rare. To bring back your earlier point -- social media may destroy children but also it may also make some more successful, it is hard to know how things will turn out. additional qualities in people that may be even better than intelligence are --- honesty, loyalty, goodness, willingness to help.