Hiring: Only hire those you don’t mind working under

A hiring philosophy that protects your company culture as you scale. Most companies hire for skills and promote into management — then wonder why the culture falls apart. Here is a different approach.

The mistake is treating leadership like a reward instead of a responsibility. If you want a company where people trust their leaders, challenge bad ideas, and still want to come back tomorrow, you need more than credentials. You need people who can earn trust through influence, model the posture of service, and create the kind of motivation that lasts because it is rooted in intrinsic alignment.

⚡ Speed Run Notes

• Promotions are culture decisions. A company does not become healthier just because high performers get more authority.
• Teams hold together through shared standards. The fastest way to preserve a company’s identity is to hire people who naturally reinforce your tribe.
• Job satisfaction is social, not just functional. A lot of whether someone likes her job comes down to the basics in Two-Factor Theory and the quality of the people around her, which is why this issue shows up again and again in why great employees quit.
• Bad hires get more expensive over time. Once the wrong person gets authority, the downstream damage multiplies.

Table of Contents

Author Credibility: Yu-kai Chou

Yu-kai Chou created the Octalysis Framework after studying gamification since 2003 — years before the term entered mainstream vocabulary. As a Human-Systems Architect & Behavioral Designer, his framework has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users.

Chou has taught the Octalysis methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO.

His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.

TEDxLausanne · Gamification to Improve Our World17 min

Only hire those who you feel comfortable working under.

This way we will make sure that, as the company grows, we will still be able to attract and hire people like ourselves, thus preserving the culture. Afterall, a huge amount of whether one likes her job or not, is the people she works with. This principle connects directly to what behavioral designers call Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness — the human need to work alongside people we respect and trust.

The Firing Philosophy

The other philosophy regarding firing is a lot more common in theory but a lot harder to execute:

If the company becomes very successful, and this person leaves the company and wants to come back, would you rehire him? If not, fire him now.

This philosophy is good in the sense that, the only mistake bigger than hiring the wrong person is keeping the wrong person on board for too long. However, team morale is an incredibly important issue, and if you suddenly get rid of people with less-than-justified reasons, morale will be low and productivity will decrease. The only time this works out is if the person was dragging down the team, and everyone would cheer if he is gone. After all, having a person not pull his weight without consequences would only discourage those who do pull their weights. So our concluding philosophy on this issue is:

Fire those who wouldn’t be rehired by anyone else in the company when the company becomes successful.

That is the FD way of human capital. A strong hiring philosophy is the foundation of any high-performance workplace culture — and when applied through the lens of the Octalysis Framework, it becomes clear that motivated teams are built on intrinsic alignment, not just functional competence.

Related Resources

• The Octalysis Framework: Complete Gamification Guide
• What is Gamification?
• Core Drive 5: Social Influence & Relatedness
• Books by Yu-kai Chou

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