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Comment by kriro | Hacker News Reader

Takeovers and special circumstances aside, "promote, don't hire externally" should be way more common and the prefered approach (imo). I think there's a three question protocol that should work reasonably well.

Q1: Do we actually need this CxO role?

Q2: Who will report to this CxO?

Q3: Why can't we promote from the pool from the answer to Q2 instead of hireing externally?

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If someone is already handling the functions of the CxO role internally and doing it well, they should be considered as a forerunner for the position.

Anyone hired externally must be expected to meet a substantially higher bar than the existing employees. Bringing in an external CxO who is less qualified than internal candidates will destroy morale and lead to attrition.

However, there’s a lot to be said for bringing in an external CxO who can take the team and the company to the next level.

A CxO role is quite different than a traditional manager role. You can’t expect good managers to automatically be good C-level executives because the work is just too different. It’s the same story as promoting ICs to managers - Different responsibilities and different skill sets.

But internal employees should always at least be considered and given a fair shot.

Eric Schmidt was a great example of bringing in outside help to take the company to the next level.

Sheryl Sandberg is another example, probably more famous mostly because I think Schmidt almost seemed like he was a founder whereas Sheryl’s story is always about coming in as the Adult to be #2.

Where the CxO role interfaces a lot with external parties is where an external hire often is better suited because they have prior experience dealing with external facets of their roles. An internal person in Finance may not have the requisite experience regarding dealing with public company reporting requirements, for example.

The Great Resignation has proven that companies don’t give one whit about attrition.

You’re very right on the bar. They have to be so clearly better (in reality as well as resume) that they can move skeptics from the bias of “I could do the job better” to “I can learn from them.”

Well one of the problems is that you're often hiring a CxO to bring characteristics of a bigger company to your smaller company as it grows. For example, if you have a haphazardly grown sales team doing about $10 million in revenue, you might want to bring in someone who has been a Director in a $100m sales org to be your Chief Revenue Officer to bring some of the sales force management and compensation practices that you need to develop as your sales team gets bigger. There's nobody in your organization who really knows that.

I must disagree. What I have seen is what you are saying enables bad internal culture, decision making and technical habits to become more ingrained into the very soul of the company.

I see well meaning senior technical people disregard my advice on technical matters because that's just not how things are done there ever, some things are so far out of the box they can't even conceive of it as a possibility. Manager after manager telling you the same answer because that's what whoever they ask about tells them because everyone at that dept/company is 15+yr tenured.

If you want to keep things as they are but maybe slightly better or to make different internal people happy you promote from within. If you want fresh thinking and new directions you gotta hire from the outside.

I can't emphasize this enough. The only analogy that comes to mind is eskimos that have to traverse a desert but only want other eskimos in their team.

If we are going to go to extremes to illustrate the disadvantages then let me point out what happens with the opposite.

When you choose to hire outside for every single leadership position especially senior ones you send the message to the people that their effort and sacrifice is not appreciated and you don't trust and that they won't be growing with the company.

The people who built the company then get disaffected and leave, eventually no one is committed and things go to hell because there is no loyalty or personal interest.

You are right, extremes are bad and balance is good. But if you have a startup and nobody in the 10 person company has managed people let along other managers for more than 5 years, yeah, hire from outside and create more management roles internally so your people can get promoted and gain experience. There is no substitution for experience, especially political experience for a political role.

>The only analogy that comes to mind is eskimos that have to traverse a desert but only want other eskimos in their team.

I suspect Eskimos would be extremely adept at traversing some desert environments! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_desert

(I kid, please don't hunt me down)

Fair enough :)

The only analogy that comes to mind is eskimos that have to traverse a desert but only want other eskimos in their team.

Another analogy is Eskimos crossing the tundra and the flashy new external-hire exec insisting on camels because that's missing off his resume...

That's why you don't hire on resume, you look at track record and reputation for a public figure like that.

It is like eskimos trying to climb mount Everest. A new (cold) challenge, but not completely different as a desert.

> Q3: Why can't we promote from the pool from the answer to Q2 instead of hiring externally?

To offer a few potential answers:

* Because the existing company culture is not conducive to taking a step forward, and you intentionally want to bring in outside ideas (e.g., bigger-company experience).

* Because the people who are the answer to Q2 don't get along all that well, or are worried about their individual career paths, and promoting one of them above the others will make them upset in the short term.

* Along the same lines - because you don't trust the people from Q2 to level up and handle the full scope, and will instead always favor "their" organization.

Anecdotally, I've observed that man CxO roles are created at the behest of the board or to acquire prestige for some purpose. It would not surprise me that it's easy to find highly successful people who will trade Prestige for money and WLB after a certain point in their career.

Promoting internally won't buy your firm more prestige/credibility.

WLB = work life balance, right

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