When the conventional wisdom is wrong

Three Silicon Valley execs tell you why hiring on the basis of experience - and other conventional strategies - are mistakes to avoid.
If you were a CEO looking for a new hire, would experience be one of the key attributes you wanted? The conventional wisdom holds that the correct answer to this question is an unequivocal “yes.” But according to business leaders who spoke at a recent forum on leadership at Stanford School of Engineering, those words of wisdom often don’t hold.
When it comes to hiring, the experience metric may not be valuable. “I tend to think that the experience aspect of hiring is almost a trap. Because if you filter on that alone, you likely are going to limit your access to great talent,” says Julia Hartz, the co-founder and CEO of Eventbrite.
Also speaking at the event was DoorDash co-founder Tony Xu, who enjoined the students not to be overly impressed with their own glittering resumes: “You’re incredibly bright, incredibly hard working. But one of the things that will hit you in the face, especially as you graduate, is that the world’s not going to care about that,” he says.
He urged audience members to set examples of competence at their future companies. “The easiest way to inspire confidence and give people the ability to bet on themselves is to show them that you can do it. If you can show them that you can do it, and if you can show them that you can do it in areas where you have no experience or understanding, I promise you that very good things will happen,” he says.
Hartz has done something else at Eventbrite that may seem counter-intuitive: There’s no mission statement on the wall. “We actually don’t have core values written down anywhere. They’re not on the wall. They’re not codified in a statement. And that has been intentional. I felt that core values are at their very best when they’re simply lived and walked and breathed and then when they’re a part of how you operate,” she says.