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Repel the wrong candidates on purpose
The honest pitch
The pitch is that everybody is hands-on, starting with the CEO, and doing mostly individual contributor work. The company pushes hard, with urgency, dedication, and focus. It does not do passion projects. It does what the company needs to succeed.
Who walks away
That costs it some competent, even brilliant people, such as seasoned professionals in the phase of life where they want a leadership title and a lighter load. Plenty of companies court exactly those people. A team made mostly of that profile struggles to succeed in a competitive environment.
Finding believers
In return, the pool has a higher density of people who buy into the model. Spotting that is hard, especially for qualitative traits and for applicants with short track records, so Bending Spoons has invested heavily in tools that predict future behavior and has made it a science.
Why does a demanding pitch attract better hires?
In his 1973 work on job-market signaling, the economist Michael Spence showed that a costly signal separates people who value something from people who do not. A job that openly demands hard work works as a filter: candidates who dislike that deal drop out, and those who accept have told the company something about themselves. Spence shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics for this line of research.
What predicts job performance best?
A 1998 meta-analysis by Frank Schmidt and John Hunter, published in Psychological Bulletin, compared hiring methods across decades of studies. Work-sample tests had a validity of about 0.54 and structured interviews about 0.51, against roughly 0.38 for unstructured interviews. Methods that make every candidate face the same standardized tasks and questions predict performance better than free-flowing conversation.
Why would a company pay new hires to quit?
Zappos has long offered new hires a payment to leave after their training, so that only people who truly want the job stay. Amazon runs a similar program for warehouse employees. The offer works as a self-selection test: people who take the money have told the company they were not committed, before the company has invested heavily in them.
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