Milk Bar founder Christina Tosi said the key to hiring a great team is learning to do the jobs yourself first.
“For the longest time, I demanded of myself to work the job, whether that was human resources, or ops, or the delivery driver, or the pick-pack-ship person,” Tosi said on Thursday’s episode of the “Pretty Tough with Maria Sharapova” podcast.
Whenever the company needed to create a new role, Tosi said she first wanted to understand what the job involved before hiring someone to do it.
“What is it like to work this job? What are the highs and the lows? What kind of personality would it take?” she said. “And then, how do I find someone who can be better than me at it?”
Beyond technical skills, Tosi said she looked for people she would want beside her, “celebrating the highs, and being in the trenches on the hard days and lows with.”
She added that she was focused on hiring women for leadership roles because of how difficult she had found it to gain opportunities herself.
“It wasn’t just getting a foot in a door. Like, I had to put my whole body in the door jam just to get in, and then I had to prove my worth,” Tosi said.
She saw an opportunity to hire talented women whose potential other employers might have overlooked and make that a strength for her business.
“I definitely know how smart and brilliant women are. I know how tough they are. I know how driven they are,” Tosi said. “And I thought, well, this is a secret that maybe other people don’t know yet, and I’m going to leverage it to my freaking advantage.”
Other entrepreneurs have also spoken about the importance of hiring thoughtfully.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, for example, said he regretted not spending more time recruiting earlier in his career. He now spends about five hours a day recruiting and focuses on results rather than résumés.
Uber founder Travis Kalanick said he tries to simulate what it would be like to work with a candidate during the interview process, “so that day one is already like week two.”
