Josh Silverman, founder and CEO of PeopleWork Partners, has spent 30 years placing designers and product people at companies like Target, Netflix, and OpenAI, and he’ll tell you the whole system runs on guesswork dressed up as process.
My biggest takeaway: “100% of the onus is on the candidate.”
My core reframe: hiring puts all the burden of proving fit on the person walking in the door, even though we both agreed culture and management are what actually determine whether someone succeeds. Most recruiters give a portfolio one to two minutes before sorting someone into a yes or no pile, and if the hire fails, the company never asks what it got wrong. To me, this is not a hiring problem. It's a sign the org has no mechanism for holding itself accountable for a bad match, so every failure gets written off as the candidate's fault instead of a system that never measured its own side of the deal.
About Josh Silverman
Josh Silverman is the founder and CEO of PeopleWork Partners (peoplework.partners). He spent a decade chairing the Master of Interaction Design program at California College of the Arts before the school's closure, and he now places designers and product people in roles at big companies. He thinks the resume is a dead format and that soft skills, not technical ones, are actually the harder skills to master.
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