Marissa Mayer Loves Paperwork, And It's Driving Some People Nuts
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, we're told, is a big fan of forms, bureaucracy, and granular control.
Some people find it frustrating.
But maybe it's the only way to re-order the chaos that is Yahoo?
Back in September, we reported that Mayer was taking the time to personally approve every single hire the company made.
Last week, Alexei Oreskovic of Reuters reported that Yahoo employees openly questioned the merits of the practice at a recent all-hands meeting.
Oreskovic said Yahoo employees complained that the company was losing out on talented hires because its process was taking so long.
Since this report, we've been in contact with a source close to Yahoo employees who agrees with the complainers at the meeting.
This source tells us that Mayer has made the entire hiring process slow and bureaucratic.
How it works:
- Mayer requires teams of at least four people to interview every single new candidate.
- Then each interviewer fills out a series of forms.
- Then HR compiles each form into one master form.
- This form then goes to Mayer's office, "to sit from between six weeks to two months before she gets around to approving it. This is not [the] wait [time] for the whole process, which takes longer, naturally, it's just the Mayer-approval wait."
- Then there is more waiting.
Our source says the whole process "adds layers of bureaucracy and bulls---, which is something [Mayer] is supposedly streamlining."
"It's a big waste of senior people's time to be sitting in all these interviews and generating all this paperwork & so on. And, teams suffer and productivity suffers while we endure the endless waits to bring people on."
Another source tells us that during Mayer's first few months at Yahoo, Yahoo's PR people had to fill out a form for every contact they wanted to make with a reporter covering the company. These forms would then get consolidated into a massive spreadsheet, which Mayer would personally review to approve every phone call or email.
Eventually and to the great relief of Yahoo PR staffers, says our source, this process stopped.
There is, of course, another side to this story.
When it comes to hiring, Yahoo's cost-structure is currently out-of-whack, so perhaps a little bureaucracy that slows down hiring isn't such a bad idea. Also, Yahoo has hired lots of mediocre employees over the years. Maybe the company needs a little quality control for some amount of time.
Mayer is not the only big-name CEO in the technology industry who insists on approving every hire. At the beginning of his tenure at AOL, Tim Armstrong insisted on doing it too. In fact, both Mayer and Armstrong got the idea from Google, where Larry Page approves all the hires.
Google is a pretty successful company.
Likewise, we've heard Mayer's insistence on granular control over PR during her early days has a lot to do with her admiration for Apple, which is particularly controlled in how it works with the press.
It's hard to blame Mayer for copying tactics from successful companies like Google and Apple, even if they do drive our sources and, apparently, lots of others at Yahoo completely nuts.