The 9 Qualities of a Perfect Employee

If you aren’t responsible for recruiting talent at your company, why would you need to know about how we hire at Box? Well, there are multiple reasons why anyone – recruiter or not – might find this information useful. For those of you interested in working in a startup, the biggest value might be the perspective it gives you into the hiring philosophies of a fast-moving company and the intangibles we look for in new recruits. Or you may be an entrepreneur growing your own team, in which case, feel free to borrow from the lessons we’ve learned throughout the years. Thinking back to my own mindset when I was graduating from college, however, I didn’t understand how to completely evaluate the organizations that were interviewing me. I was analyzing factors such as job responsibilities, compensation, product, and perks, but I underestimated how important it was to weigh the horsepower of the people I would be working with. Remember, amazing teams – not amazing ideas – build winning companies.

Aaron Levie, our co-founder and CEO, used to interview each candidate we were considering hiring. He assessed their raw smarts, quickness, passion, track record, and ensured that these hires would add to Box’s strong culture and make a huge impact. But as Box began to grow faster and faster, it became inefficient to have Aaron meet with so many potential hires. As we gradually delegated more hiring responsibilities to various managers and the process became increasingly distributed, Aaron analyzed, articulated and conveyed to our leadership team the most important traits he deemed necessary in the people we hire. The Perfect Boxer needs to be:

• A big thinker – has ambitions and dreams; will never be outdone
• Successful – we want people who know what it is like to win
• Enthusiastic – you just want to be around this person; fun, happy, excited
• Super smart – you feel like you can learn a lot from this person
• Resourceful – knows how to leverage the tools around them
• Creative – has plenty of great clever, useful ideas
• Fast – makes intelligent decisions quickly and knows how to adapt
• A perfectionist – only knows how to produce high-quality results
• Curious – incredibly inquisitive with a desire to always be learning

We realized early on that if the individuals driving hiring in the company aren’t completely committed to your company’s standards, you run into situations where the judgments of hiring managers are clouded by the pain of not having someone in the seat. When they relax their expectations, even slightly, they may solve a short-term problem but create a catastrophic long-term situation for the company that becomes incredibly tough to reverse.

There can be a tendency for A-players to only hire A’s, B’s to hire B’s, C’s to hire C’s (and so on) and this can be extremely detrimental to all future hires. Remember, great people who thrive off the energy, passion and hard work of other great people, never want to join an organization filled with, well, not-so-great people. By hiring people who exemplify the 9 qualities listed above, my team has been able to grow our company by more than 200%, while still maintaining exceptionally high standards for each new hire. Even at more than 150 employees, Box is filled with bright people who are extremely passionate about what they do.