How Netflix Reinvented HR (2014)
&gt; <i>The best thing you can do for employees—a perk better than foosball or free sushi—is hire only “A” players to work alongside them. Excellent colleagues trump everything else.</i><p>&gt; <i>Most companies spend endless time and money writing and enforcing HR policies to deal with problems the other 3% might cause. Instead, we tried really hard to not hire those people</i><p>&gt; <i>Netflix didn’t pay performance bonuses, because we believed that they’re unnecessary if you hire the right people.</i><p>Oh, so <i>that&#x27;s</i> what you&#x27;re supposed to do!  Of course, you must mean you have a foolproof system for finding &quot;A&quot; players in your candidate pipeline then, and then it&#x27;s just a matter of selecting only the best!<p>Sorry for the snark, but these things are practically truisms.  Everybody wants to hire the very best people.  Everybody wishes they didn&#x27;t need incentive structures, because in an ideal world everybody is always incentivized to just do great work all the time because they&#x27;re such an &quot;A&quot; player.<p>But really, unless they back it up with any real evidence that they&#x27;ve actually solved the hiring problem and found a reliable way to determine who the good candidates are, I&#x27;m more apt to call the whole thing luck.<p>Or maybe, just maybe, all the things Netflix is doing (lax vacation policies, no bonuses, easy to fire people) are just things companies should be doing regardless of how supposedly good at hiring they are.<p>&gt; <i>We also believed in market-based pay and would tell employees that it was smart to interview with competitors when they had the chance, in order to get a good sense of the market rate for their talent</i><p>Oh god, so it <i>is</i> true!  We&#x27;ve had a few Netflix candidates interview, seem a great fit for a position, made them an offer, and they just reject it and never talk to us again.  A rumor got around that Netflix candidates are all just using the interviews as leverage instead of being actually interested in the job.  As a result, we no longer interview candidates who are currently working at Netflix, because we can never believe that they&#x27;re serious about it.<p>It&#x27;s a huge risk to your employees to do something like this, because once word gets out about it, it becomes seriously difficult to explore other jobs while you&#x27;re still employed.