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Centering visits on food
A meal across a table is one of the most human and leveling things two people can do, so the team centers visits on food and drink. That can be a coffee or a lunch and does not need to be formal. Some people early on prefer a neutral site like a coffee shop, but the team brings candidates into the office whenever it can.
Inviting experts in
Candidates on a top-50 list are often well-respected experts, so the team invites them to give a talk or work on a fun side project. That also gives them a realistic preview of the team. The effect resembles walking onto a university campus when picking where to study: a gut feeling that this feels like home. Sometimes that moment does not hit, and learning that early helps both sides.
Airbnb's elevator
Airbnb had a similar idea early on. Joe Gebbia's motto was just get them in the elevator, because the office was on the second floor and the elevator ride up was the whole strategy. Getting someone through the door was more than half the battle.
Why does sharing a meal build trust?
In a 2015 study in the journal Human Performance, Kevin Kniffin and colleagues looked at firefighters in a large American city. Crews who ate meals together tended to perform better on the job than crews who did not. Eating the same food at the same table is a shared ritual that lowers social distance. Anthropologists have recorded communal meals as a marker of group bonds across cultures.
How fast do people form gut impressions?
Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov published a 2006 study in Psychological Science in which people judged faces after seeing them for as little as 100 milliseconds. Their judgments of trustworthiness at that glance matched the judgments of people given unlimited time. Impressions of a place form on a similar timescale and are hard to revise later. That is why the first minutes of a visit carry so much weight.
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