Mark Zuckerberg on why he prefers to recruit people directly out of college

In this interview from 2005, a 21-year-old Mark Zuckerberg is asked what he looks for in a new hire. There’s two things, he says.

“Number one is raw intelligence. You can hire someone who has been doing software engineering for 10 years, and if they’ve been doing it for 10 years, that’s probably what they’ll be doing for the rest of their life. That’s cool — there are some things that that person can do and they’re definitely useful in an organization and can do a lot of stuff. But if you find someone whose raw intelligence exceeds theirs but has 10 years less experience, they can probably adapt and learn way quicker. Within a very short amount of time they’ll be able to do a lot of things that [the person with 10 years of experience] will never be able to do. So that’s the most important thing that I look for.”

The second thing he looks for is alignment with what the company is trying to do:

“People can be really smart or have skills that are directly applicable, but if they don’t really believe in it, then they’re not going to work hard or care enough to develop the relevant experience in order to succeed. The best people I’ve hired so far have been people who didn’t really have that much engineering experience. I hired a couple of electric engineers out of Stanford to do programming stuff, and they had very little programming experience going in, but they were really smart and really willing to go at it. The guy who just wrote photos was one of those guys, and if you’re willing to just do whatever it takes to get photos out, then you’re probably more valuable than someone who is just a career software engineer.”

He concludes:

“Those are the things I’m looking for and why I would rather recruit people out of college.”

Full video: Stanford eCorner “Mark Zuckerberg: Hiring the Right People“ (Oct 2005)