Charity:water

How Charity:water poaches Google talent at dinner

Shaan recounts Scott Harrison's playbook for recruiting world-class people into a nonprofit at one-tenth their salary: take the candidate AND their spouse to dinner and deliver the Steve Jobs 'stop selling sugar water, change the world' pitch.

“And he's like, how do you convince somebody to leave their, you know, million-dollar job at Google and like, you know, "Come work for 1/10 of that for me and like save the world." And so I used to, he'd always be in San Francisco, we'd catch up and I'd be like, "So what are you in town for?" And it's always that, he was like, "I'm taking, you know, the person I want and their husband or wife out to dinner and I'm gonna tell 'em, you know, the Steve Jobs line of like, you know, stop selling sugar water and let's, you know, come change the world."”

Steal thisTo close a hard recruit, get their spouse to the dinner and sell the mission, not the salary.