Snapchat CEO’s surprising way of welcoming his new employees: “This is how I make my employees fail from their first day

Starting a new job is daunting enough as it is, but at Snapchat, newcomers are given a baptism of fire, as owner Evan Spiegel believes that it’s best to be thrown in at the deep end so that you know what pressures to expect further down the line.

New Snapchat employees forced to think from Day One

Spiegel explained his ethos in the latest edition of Stephen Bartlett’s The Diary of a CEO podcast: “At Snapchat, we have a really small design team. I think it would surprise people, we have nine people. It’s totally flat so there’s no fancy titles, everyone is a product designer,” Spiegel explained. “The way that the team works is very focused around making things. That’s the entire job. In fact, your very first day when you start, we have design critiques once a week for a couple hours. Your very first day, you have to present something... You have to make something and present it.

He continued: “What that does, that I think is really interesting and powerful is that ultimately, of course, on your first day, when you have no context for what the company is working on, no idea what’s going on - how on Earth are you supposed to come up with a great idea? I mean, it’s almost impossible.”

Don’t be afraid to fail, says Snapchat CEO

While that might seem extreme and more than a little unfair, Spiegel reasons that newbies aren’t expected to produce an amazing idea when they’ve barely had time to meet their new workmates, - just that it prepares them to tap into their creativity and critical thinking skills. Not only that, it also helps employees to immediately get over their fear of failure.

“You have to show an idea on your first day, so ultimately, on your very first day your worst fear has come true that we’re sitting there all together and we’re looking at an idea that ultimately is not that great. I mean, sometimes they’re pretty good, but ultimately not that great. That, I think that opens the door to creativity because it already happened. You already failed. The idea wasn’t good,“ the CEO explains.

”What ultimately happens on our design team is that 99 percent of ideas are not good, but one percent is. We really abide by that idea - the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. So the team is just constantly generating an incredible number of ideas, products and features. Our job is to figure out what the great ones are and then, most importantly, build a strong relationship between this little team, that’s coming up with this stuff all the time and a much bigger engineering organization, who also have all sorts of amazing ideas and build a fly wheel between the two".

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