Elon Musk's Brilliant Hiring Strategy Uses the 2-Hands Test--Instead of Degrees

Elon Musk famously discredits traditional education as means to fielding and finding top talent, saying that "college is basically for fun and not for learning." And while businesses across the nation rely on academic degrees as a tool for finding talent, Musk holds to his conviction that skills matter more than degrees. In doing so, his companies, Tesla and SpaceX, attract and retain some of the brightest minds of our time from across the globe-no degree required. But the hiring process does require two things, which comes down to one thing: the two-hands test.

What the two-hands test does is field candidates without traditional gatekeepers like degrees. Instead, it qualifies candidates through first-hand experience and hands-on expertise testing. It's a brilliantly simple process that, like any well-engineered process or product, was designed for simplicity and effectiveness--and any business can use it to find top talent.  

Though there's much debate surrounding experience versus education, for Musk, it's not simply that experience matters more than education. Rather, experience is a form of education. And in many ways, it's the best education. In fact, a report from the Association of American Colleges and Universities inadvertently proves Musk's theory. 

Leave a Comment