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Half the strugglers become superstars
Hire fast, fire fast
The standard advice is to hire fast and fire fast. At Clay, someone who looks excellent but is floundering nine months in gets a different response: the question becomes what is going on, whether it is the role, the context, or the company's own decision-making holding them back.
Half become superstars
Eventually the company finds an amazing spot for the person, and they become a superstar half the time. The other half, the person may be special but Clay cannot create the conditions for them, or they are too far away from what the company needs.
No anger
When someone doesn't work out, the founders are never angry. The person is in one place and the company is in another, and they are not getting there fast enough for what is needed at this moment. That leaves no verdict on whether the person is good or bad, only whether they were good in the moment the company needed them to be. Some incredible people could not perform at Clay and went on to do really good work elsewhere.
Where did hire fast, fire fast come from?
The phrase became a staple of startup advice in Silicon Valley, usually phrased as hire slow and fire fast. Netflix gave it wide reach with its 2009 culture presentation, which described a keeper test: would the manager fight to keep this person. The deck said adequate performance earns a generous severance package. Many startups have borrowed the framing since.
How does fit between person and workplace affect results?
Psychologists call this person-environment fit and have studied it for decades. A 2005 meta-analysis by Amy Kristof-Brown, Ryan Zimmerman, and Erin Johnson in the journal Personnel Psychology reviewed the research on fit with jobs, organizations, groups, and supervisors. It found that better fit goes with higher job satisfaction and a lower intent to quit. The link to measured job performance was smaller.
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