Steve Jobs was not an easy boss and had high expectations for his employees at Apple. He made the selection of applicants a priority because one trait was especially important to him.
Companies need new employees if they want to grow. This was also clear to the former Apple CEO Steve Jobs. For this reason, Jobs personally took part in interviews.
Jobs tested the applicants in an unconventional way. He criticized their previous work and observed their reaction. This helped him to identify whether someone could meet the high standards at Apple.
Steve Jobs annoyed applicants to test them
What did Steve Jobs do? In the book “In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations With the Visionaries of the Digital World,” the former Apple leader explained how much he valued his own involvement in the hiring process for new employees.
Jobs considered recruiting to be a top priority. Regarding this, the visionary who passed away in 2011 said:
I dedicate one day a week to supporting hiring. It is one of the most important tasks you can perform.
Steve Jobs in the book “In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations With the Visionaries of the Digital World”
In conversations with applicants, Jobs criticized their previous work. He informed himself beforehand about the former job. He described it to the potential new employee as a disaster and asked, “Why did you work on that?”
Why did he do this? He annoyed potential employees with this criticism because he wanted to know how they would react. Either the applicants defended their previous work or they folded and agreed with Jobs.
In this way, he assessed whether his counterpart possessed certain qualities. He was looking for new talents with a strong will and a strong personality.
In contrast to Jobs, his successor Tim Cook has confidence in the abilities of his employees and preferably focuses on his own tasks.
Why was this important to him? Steve Jobs was considered a difficult boss and did not want yes-sayers on his team at Apple. He occasionally needed some pushback on his decisions. Therefore, Jobs only wanted to hire individuals who passed his test in the interview.
In the early days of Apple, Steve Jobs and his co-founder Steve Wozniak hired many new talented employees. The third founding member had already left the company by this point and was no longer involved in the process.
As Apple grew rapidly and had to respond to changes in the company accordingly, it needed employees who could rise to the occasion.
Steve Jobs was quite unconventional in hiring new employees. However, he displayed similar behavior when it came to firing people. One employee had to be let go multiple times, but she did not hold it against the late Apple CEO: Employee was fired by Steve Jobs 5 times and she thanks him for this experience
