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Hire above everyone on the team
What a bar raiser is
Amazon, under Jeff Bezos, used the term. Say a company wants someone for PR, social media, and corporate communications. Everyone puts on the table, in a document, what they know about those topics.
Then the company hires someone with a much higher knowledge base than anybody on the team. That person knows how to write a blog post, make a video, write a tweet, and promote on LinkedIn, and the whole organization learns from them.
The fear in the way
Fear gets in the way. People sometimes avoid hiring someone better than themselves because the boss might like the newcomer more or the newcomer might take work away. The fix is to get everyone to agree up front to hire bar raisers, which matters most at the start of a company, when the team needs people who bring something it does not have.
Why does Amazon call it a bar raiser?
Amazon's Bar Raiser program names interviewers from outside the hiring team. Their role is to make sure each new hire is better than most of the people already doing that job. The idea is that every hire lifts the standard instead of lowering it. A bar raiser has the authority to veto a hire.
Why do managers avoid hiring stronger people?
A 2010 study led by Stephen Garcia, published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, studied social comparison in hiring. It found people tended to favor weaker candidates when a stronger one would outperform them in an area they cared about. The pattern appears when the comparison threatens self-image. Fear of being outshone drives the choice more than ability to judge talent.
How does a stronger hire teach a team?
Economists Alexandre Mas and Enrico Moretti studied supermarket cashiers in a 2009 paper called Peers at Work. They found that when a fast cashier joined a shift, the others in sight of that cashier became more productive. The effect was strongest among coworkers who could see the newcomer. Slower workers nearby sped up.
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