ReWork

these candidates? First step: Check the cover letter. In a cover letter, you get actual communication instead of a list of skills, verbs, and years of irrelevance. There’s no way an applicant can churn out hundreds of personalized letters. That’s whythe cover letter is a much better test than a resumé. You hear someone’s actual voice and are able recognize if it’s in tune with you and your company.
    Trust your gut reaction. If the first paragraph sucks, the second has to work that much harder. If there’s no hook in the first three, it’s unlikely there’s a match there. On the other hand, if your gut is telling you there’s a chance at a real match, then move on to the interview stage.

Years of irrelevance
    We’ve all seen job ads that say, “Five years of experience required.” That may give you a number, but it tells you nothing.
    Of course, requiring some baseline level of experience can be a good idea when hiring. It makes sense to go after candidates with six months to a year of experience. It takes that long to internalize the idioms, learn how things work, understand the relevant tools, etc.
    But after that, the curve flattens out. There’s surprisingly little difference between a candidate with six months of experience and one with six years. The real difference comes from the individual’s dedication, personality, and intelligence.
    How do you really measure this stuff anyway? What does five years of experience mean? If you spent a couple of weekends experimenting with something a few years back, can you count that as a year of experience? How is a company supposed to verify these claims? These are murky waters.
    How long someone’s been doing it is overrated. What matters is how
well
they’ve been doing it.

     
Forget about formal education
    I have never let my schooling
interfere with my education
.
    —MARK TWAIN
    There are plenty of companies out there who have educational requirements. They’ll only hire people with a college degree (sometimes in a specific field) or an advanced degree or a certain GPA or certification of some sort or some other requirement.
    Come on. There are plenty of intelligent people who don’t excel in the classroom. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you need someone from one of the “best” schools in order to get results. Ninety percent of CEOs currently heading the top five hundred American companies did not receive undergraduate degrees from Ivy League colleges. In fact, more received their undergraduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin than from Harvard (the most heavily represented Ivy school, with nine CEOs). *
    Too much time in academia can actually do you harm. Take writing, for example. When you get out of school, you have to unlearn so much of the way they teach you to write there. Some of the misguided lessons you learn in academia:
The longer a document is, the more it matters.
Stiff, formal tone is better than being conversational.
Using big words is impressive.
You need to write a certain number of words or pages to make a point.
The format matters as much (or more) than the content of what you write.
    It’s no wonder so much business writing winds up dry, wordy, and dripping with nonsense. People are just continuing the bad habits they picked up in school. It’s not just academic writing, either. There are a lot of skills that are useful in academia that aren’t worth much outside of it.
    Bottom line: The pool of great candidates is far bigger than just people who completed college with a stellar GPA. Consider dropouts, people who had low GPAs, community-college students, and even those who just went to high school.
     

     
Everybody works
    With a small team, you need people who are going to
do
work, not delegate work. Everyone’s got to be producing. No one can be above the work.
    That means you need to avoid hiring delegators, those people who love telling others what to do. Delegators are dead weight for a small team. They clog the pipes for others by coming up with busywork. And when they run out of work to assign, they make up more—regardless of whether it needs to be done.
    Delegators love to pull people into meetings, too. In fact, meetings are a delegator’s best friend. That’s where he gets to seem important. Meanwhile, everyone else who attends is pulled away from getting real work done.
     

     
Hire managers of one
    Managers of one are people who come up with their own goals and execute them. They