Mole End

There was some surprise at the beginning of this month that Marissa Mayer was personally reviewing every candidate being hired into Yahoo.  A lot of people, particularly the ones who calculated the ratio between a typical software engineer's annual salary and the price of the 15 minutes she might spend reviewing a resume (see her offer letter if you want to do the math), questioned whether or not this was a good use of her time.  

The Mole predicts that she won't be doing it long.  She doesn't need to.  As long as hiring managers believe that their offers might be reviewed by the CEO they will take care to avoid offers that wouldn't pass muster.  The Mole knows this from experience:  at one time, he and other hiring managers in the department had to prepare offer portfolios for review by a very senior executive.  We eventually noticed that he never overruled us, and came to suspect that he didn't even read them.  But the exercise of preparing the portfolio ensured that we were certain that our offers would stand up to serious scrutiny.  The teams we built then were exceptional.

And Paul Krasner?  The Mole, in the days when he attended performance art avidly, once saw Krasner live on stage.  The most memorable part of the evening was an extended discourse on drinking one's own urine.  While playing Penn-and-Teller-esque mindgames with the audience over the actual contents of a clear plastic cup holding some golden liquid, Krasner built up to his key insight:  one can indeed achieve some amount of enlightenment by drinking one's own urine, but the enlightenment comes in the moment one is capable of deciding to do it, not from some mystical property of the liquid itself.  

And so it is with hiring at Yahoo:  the improvement will come from the changed behavior of hiring managers who will recruit as if they will be called to explain themselves to Marissa Mayer.  Her actual reviewing of the resumes is as irrelevant as Krasner's downing of his prop.

That was how he ended the evening.