How They Hire: Aneel Bhusri, Co-founder & Executive Chair of Workday
Every week, we highlight a top founder's hiring playbook.
In 2018, Aneel Bhusri appeared as a guest on the podcast MASTERS of SCALE, sharing valuable insights into his hiring strategy. He touched on several key themes, such as cultivating an ideal workplace culture, recognizing that hiring someone means tapping into their network, gathering teams driven by a shared purpose, and carefully defining your desired company culture. However, one topic stood out as particularly crucial: your first hires can truly make or break your business.
The genetics of your company - its culture - is set by those first employees. You, the founder, should be personally involved in meeting and choosing every hire... A 'C' culture will never become an 'A' culture. The only way you get an 'A' company culture is by creating it at the beginning, and preserving it.
Aneel Bhusri, Co-founder & Executive Chair of Workday
Bhusri considers the first hires of a company to be its "cultural co-founders," and argues that they set the company's core culture.
He believes that while a 'C' level culture can be improved to a 'B+', it can never become an 'A' culture later on.
This conviction led him to personally interview the first 500 employees at Workday. His goal was to build an employee-first culture from the very beginning, a principle he learnt from his mentor and Workday co-founder, Dave Duffield.
This meticulous and personal involvement in early hiring underscores that a strong, positive culture is not a byproduct of success but the foundational cause of it.