Steve Jobs spent 20% of his time recruiting, even when Apple had 30,000 employees. He believed the gap between a great hire and an average one wasn't 2x or even 10x, but 100x. That belief shaped everything about how he built teams.
"A players hire A players. B players hire C players. If you let B players in, you start a death spiral."
Jobs kept teams deliberately small. The original Macintosh team was about 100 people. He stayed personally involved in hiring decisions long after most CEOs would have handed it off, because he saw every hire as either raising or lowering the bar for the entire company.
His interview style was famously confrontational. He would tell candidates their ideas were terrible, even when he thought they were brilliant, just to see how they responded. People who caved were out. People who got angry were also out. The ones he wanted pushed back, asked a question, and made their case better.
"If you're not sure about someone, don't hire them. Your gut is pattern-matching on thousands of data points your conscious mind can't articulate."
Beyond the confrontation test, Jobs looked for something harder to fake: passion. He wanted people who lit up talking about what they'd built, who described their work the way artists describe their art. His interview questions were simple on purpose. "Explain what you do to a 10-year-old." "Tell me about the best thing you've ever made." Clarity of thought was the real test.
"Never settle for a 'good enough' hire because you need the headcount filled. A bad hire is six months of damage plus six months of cleanup."
Jobs would rather leave a seat empty for months than fill it with the wrong person. That uncompromising standard is what made Apple's small teams capable of work that defined an era.