Hire believers
Whenever possible, Lo prefers to promote from within, but sometimes he has to hire executive team members from the outside. When that happens, the mission stays front and center there, too.
“If they don’t buy in to it, that means they’re not part of the team,” Lo says. “It’s as simple as that. We’re playing football here. If you come in here and sign up and say, ‘Football is not my game, I’d rather play ice hockey,’ that’s OK. Then go join another team. Join the ice hockey team, but here, we play football.”
To make sure he gets the right players, potential executives go through a rigorous interview process with between 10 and 15 different individual interviews.
“The first thing is to get those 10 or 15 interviewers to feel comfortable that this person’s personality will fit in to the culture of the company, and they will get a sense that this interviewee is getting excited about what we do here,” he says.
Lo has no qualms about hiring someone without the technical experience if he thinks that he or she will fit culturally.
“You can’t change somebody’s personality and cultural orientation, so it’s important for us to find the cultural fit into the executive team — more important than the technical experience or prior field experience without training,” he says.
He doesn’t tell people what to ask in the interviews, but he says some questions help get to the heart of a person, such as, “Why are you interested in what we do, what do you think is the next step that this company should take to further its success, how do you measure yourself in terms of judging whether you’re successful or not, and what do you want to do next?”
With the same kinds of questions coming at a potential executive from 10 to 15 people separately, it sends a strong signal to that person.
“Every executive who has gone through those interviews, they’re surprised how unified the message is that he or she is getting from everyone on the executive team,” Lo says. “It’s repeating again, again, again.”
And when your message is repeated and unified, it helps job candidates know what they’re getting into.
“Very rarely would we have group interviews so we can have them say, ‘Gee, even though I talked to them individually, how come all 15 of them give me the same message?’ It doesn’t look like it’s cooked up,” he says.
This creates a mutual understanding of each other.
Following the interviews, Lo then talks with the interviewers individually so that they don’t influence each other.
“I’ll just ask them, ‘What do you think is the strength of this interviewee, and what do you think is the No. 1 challenge this interviewee will have if he or she joins us?’” Lo says. “Then we group those things together and come up with all the strengths and weaknesses that people see, and then I will ask everyone to rate if someone is an absolute hire, a maybe or an absolute nonhire.”
If he can continue to do these things, then Lo will get more and more people who are completely sold on his mission, which will propel NETGEAR forward in the future.
“The most important thing is they have to buy in to it and be passionate about what we do,” Lo says. “If they’re interested in really, really excelling to help people connect to the Internet to better their lives and they’re compassionate about doing this better than our competitors, they will fit in. But if not or they’re here looking for a career to climb up further on the ladder or to learn something so they can do bigger and better jobs, then they will most likely not fit in.”
How to reach: NETGEAR Inc., (408) 907-8000 or www.netgear.com
Story feedback: Kristy O’Hara, [email protected]