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“He wants a salary of $200,000, but I can’t afford to pay him that,” “Stefan” said to me.
“Then he doesn’t fit your company culture right now,” I said. “That’s okay…”
“Why is it okay?” Stefan asked me. “And what does it have to do with our culture.”
“If you hire him, you’ll destroy your company culture,” I said.
“I don’t get it,” Stefan said. “I need great engineers, and I need to pay them well.”
“Yeah, I get that,” I said. “I’ve been in the exact situation you’ve been in. Let me explain how I handled it.”
You have to sell like crazy to recruit top talent.
Years ago, I was in a meeting with “Peter” and Jack Gifford, the founding CEO of Maxim Integrated Products. Maxim’s revenue was around $1 billion at the time of this meeting.
Peter had just been named Managing Director of the Engineering organization for a business unit that built amplifiers. It was a big deal for Peter to get this promotion, yet he was unhappy.
“Jack, I’m worried about being able to recruit engineers into the business unit,” Peter said.
You see, in the world of analog integrated circuits, designing amplifiers wasn’t…
