Lessons From Cloudflare’s Hiring Practices
Recently, the CEO of one of the world’s largest tech companies offered insights into his company’s hiring practices.
Matthew Prince is the co-founder of Cloudflare, a global web infrastructure and website security company with a $31 billion market cap (NYSE: NET). The company’s mission is to build a better Internet.
The company has more than 2,000 employees, and Prince revealed on Twitter that he still sends all job offers to new employees, and he speaks to 25% of job candidates before they’re hired. Additionally, he claims to spend 1/3 of his time on hiring.
For managers at Cloudflare, Prince says the company wants 20% of their time dedicated to hiring. Individual contributors at Cloudflare spend roughly 10% of their time on hiring.
Some other interesting data points from Cloudflare:
- The two characteristics Cloudflare looks for most in job candidates are curiosity and empathy. They value these more than education, experience, GPA, and IQ.
- Cloudflare received more than 200,000 job applications in 2021. They extended 1,455 offers and had a 92% offer acceptance rate.
- To get to those 1,455 offers, Cloudflare spent 23,919 hours interviewing candidates.
We wrote recently about how speed in hiring is a difference-maker in this job market. Interestingly, Cloudflare takes the opposite approach. Per Prince, his company’s hiring process is “intentionally slow,” and he claims to be “at least somewhat inflexible on initial compensation.” Their approach to starting compensation, he says, is because the company knows the least about the person they hire on the day they hire them. So instead, they quickly reward top performers.
Check out Prince’s entire Twitter thread here.
Curious about how other companies approach hiring and employee retention? Check out this post on Goldman Sachs.