Joel Spolsky of Joel on Software today write a bit about their hiring process at his company FogCreek. It’s interesting to read how they go about it, trying to find only the best.

Our process is not quite this developed, but we do have a process for hiring that is becoming longer and more involved each time we do it. I find that every time I hire someone I get more and more selected. Joel explained why he spends so much time to hire only superstars and I agree:

when you hire superstars you make a lot of money in terms of revenue-per-employee. That means we can have cushy private offices and high-end workstations and Aeron chairs without running out of money.

When we were at DEMO, a lot of people were surprised to hear that we moved our management team to Prague and hired a development team in the US. One VC was obviously really turned off by that, in fact…”wouldn’t it be cheaper for you to do it the other way around like everyone else?,” he said.

Actually, no. A really good quality developer, PR person, whatever, is more expensive but they can be orders of magnitude more productive also. They are really hard to find, but when you get a person like this, they can really make your company go.

One of my goals with Sproutit is to hire only the superstar, super-productive people as long as we can. They may be harder to find and they may be expensive, but in the end the quality of their work will pay off in the end.

Bonus Thought: If you are into getting things done with small teams, you can only do it with superstar teams. Think about it.