Kit Roberts
A billionaire CEO has shared two red flags that would put him off hiring a prospective candidate.
Jay Chaudhry founded Internet security service SecureIT with his wife Jyoti in 1996, before the company was acquired by Verisign in 1998.
After SecureIT, he launched CipherTrust, an email security business in 2000, before selling it for $274 million in 2006 to Secure Computing Corporation.
Since then, he has gone on to launch a number of other companies, including CoreHarbor and AirDefense.
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His most recent company dealing with cloud security Zscaler was formed in 2007.
So, over that period it's probably a fair statement that Chaudry has hired a lot of people.
Chaudry reportedly has a net worth of a staggering $9.7 billion, according to Forbes.
And while there are some things that he would look out for in a positive way, there are also red flags.
So, what are these red flags that he would look out for when hiring a new person?
Well, the first is when someone is seemingly only interested on having increasing numbers of people who 'report' to them.
In his own words, Chaudry calls them 'people who just focus on building fiefdoms'.
He added: “They view the success as linked to the budget and number of people who report”
So, that's someone who isn't interested in producing good results or doing a good job, but wants to be in charge of more people.
Which makes sense, as this could lead to people resenting the new hire if they're their new boss.
So what about the second red flag in a new hire?
Let's say that you have a quarter where the results are not great.
Not terrible, but due to weird things outside of your control, things just haven't worked out so well.
What Chaudhry said would be a red flag is when someone takes this scenario and tries to make the figures look better than they are.
We're not saying actively massaging the numbers, just trying to spin them.
He described it as 'people who like to package their results to look good.'
Instead, Chaudhry says that his ideal candidate would prioritise what they could do in order to improve the figures for next time, saying: “It’s the growth that’s very, very important."
Explaining his thought, he said: “I tell them that at Zscaler, we spend 10 percent of the time of a meeting patting ourselves on the back," saying that the other 90 percent is spent 'looking for areas of improvement.'