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Mark Zuckerberg Would Rather Hire a Brilliant Grad Than a 10-Year Veteran

By Mark Zuckerberg · Leadership · 2 min read

You can hire someone who's been doing it for 10 years. But if you find someone whose raw intelligence exceeds theirs with 10 fewer years of experience — they can probably adapt and learn way quicker.

Key Points

The two most important things: raw intelligence and alignment with the mission
A brilliant person with less experience will adapt and learn faster than a solid veteran
Facebook hired electrical engineers from Stanford with almost no coding experience — they built key products

If you find someone whose raw intelligence exceeds theirs but has 10 years less experience, they can probably adapt and learn way quicker.

Raw Intelligence First

Zuckerberg: The two most important things I look for — number one is raw intelligence. You can hire someone who's a software engineer and has been doing it for 10 years. That's cool. There are things that person can do and they're definitely useful.

But if you find someone whose raw intelligence exceeds theirs but has 10 years less experience — they can probably adapt and learn way quicker.

Raw intelligence first. Someone brilliant with less experience will adapt and learn faster than a veteran.

Alignment With the Mission

Zuckerberg: The second thing is whether the person believes in what you're doing. If someone doesn't believe in it, they won't work hard enough to develop the skills they may be missing.

Someone who really believes in the mission will push through the learning curve because they want to see it work.

If someone doesn't believe in what you're doing, they won't work hard enough to develop the missing skills.

Electrical Engineers Building Facebook

Zuckerberg: We recruited a bunch of electrical engineers from Stanford who had almost no programming experience. They were brilliant people who believed in what we were doing.

One of them built Facebook Photos — a product used by hundreds of millions of people. Built by a guy who could barely code when he started.

We hired electrical engineers with almost no coding experience. One of them built Facebook Photos.