I am writing this article five weeks into California’s shelter-in-place. And so it seems like I am writing about a bygone era when it was normal to have a meal or a drink with someone in person — and not just on Zoom. While I don’t possess a crystal ball, my hunch is that the tradition of breaking bread and sharing a drink with someone will return. 

Before Tacos del Sol in Alviso, CA was a restaurant, it was a food truck. And one that was hard to find. I got introduced to it when a colleague at Yahoo asked if I wanted tacos. Of course I was in. Since moving to CA in 2005 I fell in love with the taco scene (it was just not to the same level as the scene in Dallas at that time). Finding the truck was challenging. It parked in a few locations. No one seemed to know the formula, but basically you just drove around the small town in the salt marshes and you would stumble upon it. I mean Alviso isn’t that big. Probably a lot of the charm was it feeling a bit secret.

Over the next few years at both Yahoo & Netflix, I had quite a few tacos there. And many of those taco trips were to recruit someone to one of my teams. I remember making the pitch to Brian Cox (son of the famous actor Ronny Cox) to join while we both sat on bleachers and chowed down on lengua tacos. Later, when Brian was looking to leave Netflix, he reached out and all he had to say was, “It’s time for tacos.” This time it was La Victoria, a famous establishment in San Jose. And once again over tacos we charted his next career steps.

When I was recruited away from Netflix for a stint at Meebo (a startup later acquired by Google), Elaine Wherry invited me to Red Rock Cafe in Mountain View for coffee & career conversations. Once again over a bit of culinary delight (this time not tacos, but muffins and a coffee drink) we talked about what I wanted to do next and why that should be an endeavor that put the two of us together. It worked. 

Elaine was a master of recruiting. She must have really stayed caffeinated with the volume of recruiting she did at Meebo. And what an incredible team she hired. One of her most famous hires was a young engineer straight out of Stanford (where she hailed from as well). Mikey was a super sharp developer who left Meebo shortly after I joined with the idea of creating a startup called Burbn with his friend Kevin. With a pivot it became Instagram and Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom became two of the most important startup founders in tech history. Her small team had many folks who went on to create startups and be tech leaders in the industry. She put Red Rock and coffee to good use.

When I had been recruited to Netflix, Kevin McEntee (my future boss) would come to my talks with one of his teams (my future UI Engineering team). They always wanted to have lunch with me. I was a bit naive and didn’t realize till later that it wasn’t just that they liked my talks and the food, they were breaking bread with me in order to recruit their future boss.

The first hire I made at Netflix was Erik Toth. I found Erik through a former colleague at Yahoo, Nate Koechley. I had reached out to Nate and many others seeking to find just the right person to add to my new team. Nate had coincidentally had dinner the night before and one of the fellow diners had caught his attention. That was how I met Erik. Erik became a top talent at Netflix and later was my first hire at PayPal. The last role he had for me was leading application engineering for Venmo. But it all started over a dinner with a friend of mine.

When I joined Netflix, I got a master class in recruiting from Kevin McEntee, Jessica Neal, Patty McCord, Bethany Brodsky and many others. What I found that stood out about recruiting at Netflix was how highly personal it was. Instead of hiring managers delegating their recruiting to the recruiting team, they engaged as directly as possible with people they found could be an interesting team member.

A large part of my job there was continuous outreach directly and personally. I had coffee, breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks with engineers weekly, sometimes multiple meetups. What I learned was that in order to hire the best, you have to engage directly with the best. People have to make big decisions to leave their current team or role. And the best people aren’t really looking. We call them “passive” candidates. It is up to us as hiring managers to convert them to “active” candidates.

A bit part of this was using my talks as a way to meet candidates and then follow up with them in person for coffee or tacos or even Tea Leaf Salad at Burma Superstar (another gem in San Francisco). The nature of meeting someone in person, breaking bread or sharing drinks, lets them see you in a more personal way. If someone is going to work with you it is good that they can ask you any type of question and feel that you are someone they can trust.

One point I will make though, is you have to make sure that you aren’t picking people by the criteria of who you would like to “drink a beer with”. This is part of the problem with the Silicon Valley “bro culture”. It is too easy to choose someone like yourself. So you make the criteria for whom to have conversations with in person based on having a diverse slate of talent. But I believe you still want the authenticity that comes when you care enough about the person to take the time to meet with them personally.

So what is the lesson of tacos & coffee? Stop delegating the hiring to your recruiting partners!. Care enough about future team members to meet them in person. Take the time and give it to them. If you don’t have time to do this, then you won’t have time to nurture them and grow them. And candidates want to engage with a hiring manager. 

The obvious pushback on this is how do I make the time for this? Well it is key to work with your recruiting partners to teach them what you are looking for in candidates. Your partners can help you source and screen. But once you find someone that you believe would be a good addition to the team, then you must own the process. From recruiting to hiring to onboarding and beyond. It is worth every minute you invest. Where you spend your time tells what you value. Value people.