If wealth is how you determine a person’s success, he’s among the planet’s richest. If it’s ambition and influence, Elon Musk has already and substantially impacted the automotive industry and electric vehicles through Tesla, and he’s planning to colonize Mars and connect the whole world to the internet through Space X, among other gigantic aspirations. He’s also both entered unchartered markets and withstood competition from some of the world’s biggest corporations successfully. So, we could definitely all learn at least a thing or two from why the renowned entrepreneur hires and fires people.
Let’s get straight to the point of why you’re here.
Does He Care About College Degrees?
“There’s no need to even have a college degree, at all,” said Musk to Auto Bild TV‘s interviewer. She attempted to get a glimpse of his take on recruitment. But why make such a bold statement?
Musk believes so because “that may be an education”, but it doesn’t necessitate that they’re capable of great things.
So, Why Does Elon Musk Hire People?
The Story of a Career
In Auto Bild TV’s interview, Musk stated that he asks potential employees in the recruitment process to tell him the story of their career, the tougher problems they encountered, how they handled them, and how they took decisions during “key transition points“.
“And usually that’s enough for me to get a very good gut feel about someone. And what I’m really looking for is evidence of exceptional ability. That they face really difficult problems and overcome them. Then, of course, you want to make sure that if there was some significant accomplishment, were they really responsible? Was someone else responsible?” He elaborated.
But that’s not hard, Musk says, because it’s usually the case that the person knee-deep in the problem really understands it. “You can ask them detailed, very detailed questions about it. They will know the answer.”
Innovation Is the Leading Prerequisite
Musk was invited to the Air Warfare Symposium held by the U.S. Air Force where he participated in a multi-faceted conversation. When asked about recruitment, he echoed some of what he said in the above-mentioned interview, but also added crucial details.
“[When we] interview people we ask for some evidence of exceptional ability that includes innovation,” he said. “At the interview point, we select for new people who want to create new technology.”
And it’s not just about how much an employee innovates, but your “innovations aspirations” matter as well. “Speed of innovation is what matters. I do say this to my teams quite a lot. Innovation per-year is what matters.”
So, Innovation Is Properly Rewarded
According to Musk, an employee’s income at the company, their advancement within it, and subsequently the length of their stay at it, are affected by how innovative they are and the innovations they aspire to partake in.
“Incentive structure is set up that innovation is rewarded,” he elaborated in the same interview.
But When Would He Fire Those People?
It follows, then, based on preceding statements here, that those who are evaluated as not innovative enough are fired. Those who don’t have good enough aspirations to innovate should also be fired in Musk’s view.
And that’s what he asserted is the primary reason for why an employee at one of Musk’s companies would be let go. He put it swiftly during the U.S. Air Force interview, “Failure to try to innovate comes with a big penalty, you will be fired.”
He Also Reportedly Fires for Other Unfair Reasons
Musk also fires people to make the products of his enterprises cheaper. In 2019, he wrote a difficult-to-read email to Tesla’s employees. “While we have made great progress, our products are still too expensive for most people,” the email read. He then fired 3,000 of them.
This media report by Wired magazine includes claims from employees that Musk rage-fires employees on the spot. Sometimes, it happens upon chance encounters where one of them answers a question incorrectly or responds in a manner that triggers him while angry. Firing on the spot is, needless to say, a sign of bad and unjustifiably reactive leadership.
After the horrendous onset of the novel coronavirus pandemic in the U.S., the controlled Washington Post also reported that Tesla’s Nevada factory fired employees who chose to stay home to avoid contracting the virus! The above-mentioned report also stated that “Tesla and Alameda County officials did not respond to requests for comment.”
Finally, he’s also been criticized by a senior contributor at Forbes for having a not-so-strong hiring process. You could read more about that here.
What do you think we could gain from Musk’s criteria and mistakes? Share your opinion with us!
