SpaceX employees are instructed to hire people 'better than themselves' — and they look for 3 qualities

Thomson Reuters

• A vice president of human resources at SpaceX said hiring managers at the company look for passion, drive, and talent.
• It sounds simple, but former employees at SpaceX note the interviewing process is intense.
• Interviewees go through phone screenings and a full day of interviews.

Getting a job at Elon Musk's SpaceX is incredibly hard.

Candidates must go through multiple rounds of phone screenings and a full day of seven to eight hour-long interviews. But Brian Bjelde, vice president of human resources at SpaceX, says there are really only three things you need to show in your interview.

"I distill what we're looking for in candidates down to three items: passion, drive, and talent," Bjelde told Glassdoor.

"In general, we ask our hiring managers and the employees that we've selected to be part of the interviews to always be focused on hiring people better than themselves," he said. "If you're given the opportunity to grow your team and you seek out someone better than yourself, then you're going to make the company better."

Still, as easy as that might sound, interviewing at SpaceX is intense, former SpaceX employee Josh Boehm previously told Business Insider. At any part of the process, an interviewer was instructed to abruptly cut short the interview if they had doubts.

"If you know in the middle of an interview that [an applicant answers a question] that totally changes your mind, you're not supposed to just be polite and finish it out. You have to end it right there and escort them out," said Boehm, who worked at SpaceX from 2013 to 2016.

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