Tips From CEO and President of OppenheimerFunds
by ARTHUR STEINMETZ, Chariman, CEO, and President at OppenheimerFunds
All of the hiring I have done in my career has been at the senior level -- for investment professionals when I led teams of portfolio managers and analysts, and now, as a CEO, for senior leaders across multiple disciplines.
For those types of positions, there are, of course, a number of threshold requirements – plenty of education and a good amount of technical skill to meet the specific demands of each position. But there are a lot of really smart people out there who have lots of experience. To find really exceptional talent, I’ve always looked for three essential qualities.
Enthusiasm
When interviewing people, I’m often impressed by those who seem eager to be let loose to address the opportunities and challenges the position will present.
It’s often a red flag if, in an interview, people seem too concerned about the accoutrements of the job, like the benefits package or the size of their office. Of course, on things like benefits we have to stay competitive with the industry to attract the best talent, but when meeting candidates we like to see evidence that they’ve read the job description, and they’ve gotten excited and started to formulate ideas about how to handle the issues they’ll face.
Original Thinking
As an active investment manager, we know that to beat the financial market indices our performance is measured against, you have to be different. Being different doesn’t in itself guarantee that you’ll beat a benchmark, but it’s the starting point on the only course that can lead you to outperforming.
To be different as a firm, you really have to find people who think differently. I met with many candidates for our analyst positions who gave me rote descriptions of how they pick good investments. They said noncontroversial things like, “I look for companies with strong management teams, good earnings momentum and competitive advantages in their industries.”
That is akin to saying, “I think hurting puppies is bad.” Who would not agree with that?
Simply stating the obvious isn’t sufficient. I’m more intrigued when someone tells me an idea I might not agree with initially, even if my flash reaction sometimes is, “That idea is nuts.”
You can’t be unconventional just for the sake of being unconventional, of course. But if someone demonstrates that there is intellectual rigor behind their idea, and it gets me to see things in a new way, that is the kind of thinking we want to bring to our firm.
This quality also ties into the first. We want to see people who are passionate about the discoveries their unique way of thinking can lead to – the kind of enthusiasm and excitement that led to Greek scholar Archimedes to shout “Eureka” when he discovered the concept of displacement.
A Collaborative and Independent Spirit
Some organizations think you can get the best out of people by pitting them against each other in a highly competitive environment. In those shops, you have managers fighting for resources and for recognition, and there ends up being a Darwinian-like winnowing out process in which the people who are the best at that game rise to the top.
That may work for some firms, but it is not how we conduct business. At our firm, we have 14 independent teams, but we believe the best way for them all to succeed is to be collegial and share ideas with each other. Success at our firm requires you to be generous with your knowledge. People who want to hold onto their ideas and not invest in other people’s success generally don’t fit with our culture.
Even though our teams do frequently collaborate, they are still highly independent. We do not have a top-down bureaucratic process telling people what to do. As Steve Jobs famously said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”
From (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-i-hire-stop-giv...)
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