Elon Musk’s Controversial Interview Question

Summary

Podcast Summary: Nudge – Elon Musk’s Controversial Interview Question
Host: Phil Agnew
Guest: Gert Renzo, World-Renowned Psychologist and Heuristics Expert
Release Date: March 17, 2025

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Introduction

In the March 17, 2025 episode of Nudge, host Phil Agnew delves into the unconventional hiring strategies of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos with his expert guest, Gert Renzo. The episode explores how these tech titans prioritize simplicity and exceptional ability in their recruitment processes, challenging traditional hiring methodologies that favor comprehensive evaluations.

Elon Musk’s Hiring Technique

Simplistic Yet Effective Approach

Phil Agnew opens the discussion by contrasting standard interview practices with Elon Musk's minimalist approach. While most organizations deploy extensive interviews to evaluate candidates on multiple criteria, Musk reduces the process to just two questions, seeking a singular but powerful indicator of a candidate’s potential.

Notable Quote:
Phil Agnew [00:00]: "My interview question is always the same."

Gert Renzo’s Insights on Heuristics

Gert Renzo explains Musk’s method as a "one cue heuristic," focusing solely on whether a candidate possesses exceptional ability. This approach aligns with heuristic decision-making, where simplicity can lead to more effective outcomes under certain conditions.

Notable Quote:
Gert Renzo [02:13]: "So many organizations hire by a more is better strategy. More data is better by the candidate, more of everything."

The Science Behind One Cue Heuristic

Comparative Study Results

Renzo discusses a 2019 study involving 236 airline job applicants, demonstrating that Musk’s heuristic outperformed traditional methods like logistic regression. Managers using the single-cue approach were better at identifying top performers compared to those evaluating multiple factors.

Notable Quote:
Gert Renzo [06:54]: "Musk's hiring heuristic outperformed logistic regression across all conditions, meaning managers using this simpler method were better at choosing the stronger candidates."

Jeff Bezos’s Similar Strategy

Three-Cue Heuristic

Jeff Bezos employs a slightly more complex heuristic, utilizing up to three cues. After establishing exceptional ability, Bezos asks if he admires the candidate and whether they would elevate the team's performance. This "fast and frugal tree" approach ensures high-quality hires by maintaining a balance between simplicity and thoroughness.

Notable Quote:
Gert Renzo [08:29]: "Bezos used up to three reasons, not one, which corresponds to a type of heuristic that I call fast and frugal trees."

Multiple Interviewers vs. Single Interviewer

Efficiency Over Quantity

Renzo challenges the common belief that more interviewers lead to better hiring decisions. Citing a 2014 study titled "Are Two Interviewers Better Than One?", he illustrates that adding more interviewers can dilute the selection accuracy. A single, highly skilled interviewer often outperforms multiple less effective ones.

Notable Quote:
Gert Renzo [13:38]: "We ran a study and found that you actually usually do better if you have a single interviewer, but it must be the best one that you have."

Study Breakdown

Using an example where the best interviewer has an 80% accuracy rate and the second has 60%, Renzo explains that a single top interviewer can identify 8 out of 10 top candidates. Adding a second interviewer reduces this accuracy to 7 out of 10, demonstrating that additional opinions may not enhance and can even hinder the hiring process.

Notable Quote:
Gert Renzo [10:56]: "In hiring you can make two errors—a miss or a false alarm. Bezos, unlike Musk, would hire more people to minimize false alarms at the cost of missing some good candidates."

Practical Implications for Businesses

Training Over Quantity

Renzo advocates for investing in training a few excellent interviewers rather than increasing the number of interviewers. High-quality, well-trained interviewers are more likely to make accurate hiring decisions, especially in environments filled with uncertainty and limited resources.

Notable Quote:
Gert Renzo [17:38]: "They should train a few which are really excellent in interviewing and also in their job."

Conclusions and Key Takeaways

Less Is More

The episode reinforces the notion that simplicity in hiring can lead to better outcomes. By focusing on key indicators of exceptional ability and utilizing fewer but more skilled interviewers, companies can enhance their recruitment effectiveness.

Practical Advice:

• Adopt Heuristics: Use single or limited cues to identify standout candidates.
• Invest in Training: Develop the skills of a few top interviewers instead of involving many.
• Minimize Complexity: Simplified hiring processes can outperform traditional, multifaceted approaches.

Final Thoughts by Phil Agnew

Phil Agnew summarizes the insights, emphasizing that in uncertain environments, relying on clear, singular indicators can be more reliable than trying to balance numerous factors. The episode concludes with a nod to Gert Renzo’s book, Smart Management, and additional resources for listeners interested in behavioral science and effective management strategies.

Notable Quote:
Phil Agnew [18:06]: "Less can be more. Fewer factors in hiring can lead to better hiring decisions, and fewer interviewers of higher quality can lead to better candidates being hired."

Additional Resources

• Gert Renzo’s Book: Smart Management – Explores why heuristics outperform complex models, negotiation tactics, team sizing, and more.
• Recommended Reading List: "25 Must-Read Books on Behavioral Science in 2025" – Available for free download in the show notes.

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This episode of Nudge provides a compelling argument for re-evaluating traditional hiring practices. By spotlighting the methods of industry leaders like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and backing these approaches with scientific research, Agnew and Renzo offer actionable insights for businesses aiming to enhance their recruitment strategies.

Transcript

[Phil Agnew]

My interview question is always the same.

[Gert Renzo]

What did you ask?

[Phil Agnew]

I said, tell me about some of the most difficult problems you worked on and how you solved them.

[Narrator]

Now that might not sound too controversial, but Elon Musk's interview questions have sparked debate throughout the business world. Rather than asking a number of questions to understand a candidate better, Elon asks just two questions rather than taking time to deliberate. If a candidate is right, he decides based off gut instinct. This goes against conventional wisdom, and it's very different from how most firms hire. Yet today's guest on Nudge says that Elon's method for hiring might be best to hear why Keep listening marketing in 2025 isn't getting any easier. Customers are more switched on, they're harder to reach, and they're quick to spot anything that isn't authentic. Most marketing teams are stretched thin. They're expected to do more with less, while proving that every pound spent is worth it. That's why HubSpot's talk, the 2025 Marketing Trends Report, focuses on what actually works for marketing teams. There's no fluff, it's just practical advice from teams that get results. Inside, you'll find a straightforward guide to using AI without any complex jargon. You'll find ready made templates for videos and visuals. You'll learn about a smarter way to work with influencers and finding people you can actually trust. And you'll even learn clear ways to prove to your boss that your marketing is paying off. All of it is based on solid research, but more importantly, it's useful. It's something you can apply straight away if you're dealing with tight budgets or tough targets, or just trying to keep up. This report should help. To download HubSpot's 2025 Marketing Trends Report, head to HubSpot.com marketing to download it for free on Nudge. Today I am joined again by the world renowned psychologist and former director of the Max Planck Institute and leading expert on heuristics, it's Gert.

[Gert Renzo]

So my name is Gert Renzo. I'm studying how people make decisions, in particular under uncertainty.

[Narrator]

So let's get right into it, starting with what makes Elon Musk's hiring technique so controversial.

[Gert Renzo]

So many organizations hire by a more is better strategy. More data is better by the candidate, more of everything. That's not how Tesla CEO Elon Musk reported himself when he did the hiring at a time where Musk was young and Tesla small.

[Phil Agnew]

When I interview somebody, I really just ask them to tell me the story of their career and what are some of the tougher problems that they dealt with, how they dealt with those, and how they made decisions at key transition points.

[Gert Renzo]

So according to him, when considering a job candidate, he used what we call a one clever. So it's only one reason and not more. For many of my dear colleagues in behavioral economics or in psychology, this is a cognitive illusion or bias or something, because you should use all the information.

[Narrator]

On average, most job candidates can expect to answer at least 10 questions before getting a job offer. They should expect to explain their experience, their suitability for the role, their strengths, why they're a good culture fit, and perhaps how well they understand the business. But Musk asks just two questions and looks for just one cue. Musk's hiring rule is if a candidate has exceptional ability, make a job offer. Otherwise do not. Here's why.

[Gert Renzo]

If someone has an exceptional ability, and even if it would be that the person is a highly skilled, say, violin player, which probably doesn't help Tesla, but this feature or this variable is a variable that brings along a number of other features that are useful for Tesla. Namely, you can bet that this person has learned to persevere, to concentrate, to sweat, to stay on the job, and even maybe to, if it's an orchestra player, to learn how to deal with other people. This is why we call this one clever queue heuristic.

[Narrator]

Based on this, Elon Musk would hire a highly skilled violin player even if violin playing wasn't relevant to the role. He doesn't necessarily want evidence that they'd be good specifically at the job at Tesla. He just wants evidence of exceptional ability. The rationale is that it takes exceptional ability to solve very difficult problems. Also, it's quite difficult to fake a convincing answer to this question when probed for details. This is what Musk does when evaluating a candidate's response.

[Phil Agnew]

That question, I think is very important because the people that really solve the problem, they know exactly how they solved it. They know the little details. And the people that pretended to solve the problem, they can maybe go one level and then they get stuck.

[Narrator]

So should everyone use this hiring technique?

[Gert Renzo]

Then the question is in what situation is it a good one and where not? And this question of ecological rationality, and we have done some mathematical proofs, show if the first cube is the only one, if its weight is larger than the sum of all the others, so the additional contribution, technical terms, the sum of the alge in a linear regression, then you can prove that doing a more complicated analysis will never be better, but a waste of time and Maybe with too much thinking, you get to the wrong candidate at the end. It's also an example for what I call the adaptive toolbox. So this heuristics are part of the adaptive toolbox. And adaptive means you have to consider the environment in order to find out whether it's a good idea. And Musk's heuristic, namely one reason does this person possess some exceptional ability? Works at the beginning. So when Tesla was small, when you need creative people, you need people who can rely. It will no longer work when Tesla got big. Then you need other abilities, more for routine tasks, and so on.

[Narrator]

Gert ran a study in 2019 to prove that Musk's hiring technique can be more effective. He and his CO authors studied 236 job applicants who were hired by an airline and compared different methods managers used to pick the best candidates. Each applicant was evaluated based on three key factors or cues. And after three months on the job, their performance was rated by the supervisors. The researchers created 50,000 possible candidate pairs where one applicant had performed better than another. They then tested the two interview methods. They compared interviews that used Musk's heuristic. So this is the simple method that looks for just one important factor first and then stops once a clear difference is found. And they compared that to those who used a more traditional interview technique, which they called logistic regression, a more complex statistical model that considers three factors equally in every hiring hiring decision. Put simply, some managers hired based on one standout factor, like Musk. Others hired by taking into account at least three different factors. Gert found that Musk's hiring heuristic outperformed logistic regression across all conditions, meaning managers using this simpler method were better at choosing the stronger candidates. It seems counterintuitive. Yet the evidence suggests that less is more when it comes to hiring. And Musk isn't allay. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos used a very similar technique.

[Gert Renzo]

So that's Musk. And Jeff Bezos used a quite similar procedure for hiring. So Bezos used up to three reasons, not one, in a way that corresponds to a type of heuristic that I call fast and frugal trees. So it's like a decision tree, but fast. So you ask one question, so same situation, you want to hire a number of people. The first question Bezos asks again when he was young and when Amazon was young, he reports that he asked first the same question is Musk, does this person possess some exceptional ability? If no, no higher. If yes, Musk would have hired Bezos, not Bezos asked in the next question, which is quite interesting, do I admire this person? Now he explained that by saying, I want to learn in my job. If I admire a person, I learn something from him or her. So if the answer was no, no higher. If yes was still not sufficient, then he asks a final question which is will this person raise the average level of effectiveness in the group they are entering? And that's a reasonable question because by hiring only people who do better than average, you get a constant up and only if there was another yes Here.

[Narrator]

Bezos would hire Elon Musk uses just one queue to hire a candidate Jeff Bezos uses three three I started today's episode suggesting that most firms don't hire that way, but I should admit that that's not entirely true. In a study I referenced earlier, Gert also tested whether real world managers actually used heuristics in hiring decisions. Human research managers and business students with different levels of hiring experience participated in an experiment where they had to hire a receptionist and a data analyst. The results showed that more experienced managers were far more likely to use Musk's single queue heuristic then less experienced managers. Experienced managers seem to know what Musk and Bezos already knew that heuristics can lead to better hiring decisions. But why is this?

[Gert Renzo]

In hiring you can make two errors a miss. You don't offer position to someone who would be a good one or a false alarm. You offer position to someone who isn't a good choice. And Bezos, unlike Musk, Musk would hire more people. Bezos has more nos. You have to fulfill all three criteria. So he is minimizing the false alarms at the cost of missing. And you can deconstruct these fast and frugal trees in a way that you can either minimize misses or minimize cost and so on. That's the scientific part of that. But again, these are very different ways to do hiring than a usual assessment center who bets on more is always better. And to the degree that hiring is a part of uncertainty and the uncertainty should not use all the data, but only sufficiently less. And that's the real question. How much do you need? Musk thought just one Bezos up to three.

[Narrator]

Using single cues to hire might seem controversial, but Geertz suggests that it's more effective. After the break, he tackles perhaps an even more controversial should interviews contain multiple interviewers or just one interviewer? Find out after this this podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals and the podcast. I would like to recommend Today is Content is Profit. It is hosted by my friends Lou, Louise and Fonzie. On the show, they showcase the secrets and strategies about how your business can achieve a frictionless sale. The duo talk about frameworks, strategies, tactics, and even bring special guests on to provide you all the information you need to turn your content into profit. I think it's a fantastic show. There's loads of fantastic episodes they've created, including one episode with me. So go and listen to Content is Profit wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back. You are listening to Nudge with me, Phil Agnew. Now let's tackle another controversial topic. There is a common belief that having multiple interviewers should lead to better hiring decisions. More opinions should help find a better candidate. More voices should add balance. Many companies ask candidates to interview with four, five, or even six different people. They want to make sure they can find the best candidate. But does more interviewers actually improve hiring decisions? Gerd's not so sure and he has an example to prove it.

[Gert Renzo]

For instance, I once consulted Boston Consulting on their hiring process. Boston Consulting was running on more is always better, doing maybe six interviews with every candidate. So we ran a study and found that you actually usually do better if you have a single interviewer, but it must be the best one that you have. And if you add a second interviewer to the best one, it can never get better. You can prove that you only would have to add a large number that you might have a chance.

[Narrator]

Let me explain this study to you. It's a 2014 study titled Are Two Interviewers Better Than One? Now imagine a company is trying to select 10 top candidates from a large applicant pool. Let's say your best interviewer at your company has an 80% accuracy rate, meaning they correctly identify 8 out of 10 top candidates, but they will miss 2 out of every 10 people. But the second best interviewer at your company has just a 60% accuracy rate, so they identify some good candidates, but out of 10 they will typically miss four. Here's what happens when you let your best interviewer decide alone.

[Gert Renzo]

So if you just let the best reviewer doing the decisions, you can bet of the 10 people you hire, eight are among 10 best. Now assume that you add the second interviewer to the best one and you use what's usually done a majority rule. So the candidates who have two votes versus candidates have one vote or zero vote. And then you can show that if the first interviewer gets eight best and this second one gets six of the best ones, and even if it's six out of the same one of the same eight. Then the two others that the first interviewer identifies, they get only if the votes are random. Maybe get one of the two will get a vote. There's one not so by majority rule, you end up with seven and not with eight.

[Narrator]

Let's explain as it gets a little complex when both interviewers vote on which candidate they like. Some candidates will receive two votes from both interviewers. Those are the people who are very likely to be top candidates and will typically be good at the job. However, many candidates will get only one vote each. The best interviewer will like someone who the second best interviewer doesn't like. And the second best interviewer will like a candidate that the best interviewer dislikes. Because the same amount of votes are given to both interviewers. Now only seven out of the ten best candidates can be selected. That is one fewer than if the best interviewer had decided alone. The second interviewer doesn't improve selection, they dilute the quality. You go from 80% of the candidates being the best to just 70%. Adding more interviewers to your interviews can reduce accuracy. Instead, Gert suggests investing in training top interviewers rather than assuming that more opinions can lead to better decisions. But Gert was quick to admit that there might be some good reasons for having multiple interviewers.

[Gert Renzo]

Big companies like Boston Consulting are not only out to find the best candidates, they also want to impress their candidates so that they actually accept. If you get one and being interviewed by six people and called back two or three times and put up in the best hotel in Munich, that may impress people. But that's another story. You can also impress young candidates with all other kinds rather than with them. Elaborate hiring procedure that's probably not as good as a more simpler one.

[Narrator]

In general, less is more when it comes to interviewers.

[Gert Renzo]

So that means that the strategy that Boston Consulting then had to have many, many interviewers is not a good one. They should not increase the number of people whom they involve in interviews, but they should train a few which are really excellent in interviewing and also in their job. Another case of less can be more.

[Narrator]

Opinions vary on Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and often I'm not sure that following the advice of just the successful is always right. It can lead to survivorship bias, after all. But Gert has shown some fairly conclusive evidence that their hiring strategies, at least for startups, make sense. In a world of uncertainty, Finding one clear cue that a candidate is exceptional is often more reliable than attempting to balance a number of different factors. If there's one takeaway today, it's that less can be more. Fewer factors in hiring can lead to better hiring decisions, and fewer interviewers of higher quality can lead to better candidates being hired. So next time you interview a candidate, rather than trying to see if they'd satisfy dozens of different criteria, why not look to see if they're exceptional in one area? It will probably help you find a better candidate. That's all for today folks. A big thank you for Gert for joining me today. His book Smart Management is packed with some fantastic examples. Things like why heuristics outperform complex models, how to negotiate like a pro, the ideal size for your team, and even why giants like Apple and Amazon are at their core imitators. It is a brilliant read and I've linked to the book in the Show Notes. If you are looking for more great books to read, I have compiled a list of the 25 must read books on behavioural science in 2025. And in that list I've also included five books you should probably avoid. So if you want my reading list, you can grab it for free. Just head to the Show Notes to download it. It takes just five seconds to download and it could provide you with a whole year of great books to read. So just click the link in the Show Notes to download the reading list. Okay, that is all for this week. Thank you for tuning in. I'm Phil Agnew and I'll be back next Monday with another episode of Nudge. Bye.