The HR exec who helped build Netflix into a $161 billion juggernaut has some harsh advice for tech companies and their employees

Job seekers: Don't be passive about the process. Do your due diligence about potential employers.

McCord has interviewed thousands of people for jobs, but she hasn't forgotten what it's like to be the applicant. She says one of her worst career decisions was taking a job at a certain software company, so she could stay closer to her home and children.

"I’m a recruiter so I made them want me," she said. "I spent so much time and energy convincing them that I was the one, that I spent almost no time finding out who they were."

That would cost her. Her new employer put her desk right outside the men's bathroom. They gave her an outdated Wang 286 computer and a rotary phone.

Then came her first meeting with her new boss.

"She said, 'You know, Patty, you have a lot of ideas and we’ve had them all, and they don’t work so it would be really helpful if you’d just stop having them. You know you’re making the other people uncomfortable. You’re too aggressive and you know [HR is] here to make the rules and make sure that everybody follows them.'"

But that disaster would lead her into two important areas that would help shape the rest of her career.

See every job, no matter how unpleasant, as an opportunity to learn.

Though McCord didn't find much job satisfaction at Borland, it was there that she learned a lot about computer engineers and how they think. That was good, she said, because she would over the years eventually need to hire scores of them.

"Because it was so awful I had to find solace somewhere," McCord said of her time at the company. "So, I discovered software engineers and I just started hanging out with them all the time."

The experience meant she "discovered my love for technologists and technology." From there, she would follow one of her bosses to a startup that made software tools for other software engineers.

"By that time I had a little geek cred, and I went to Pure Software and that's where I met Reed [Hastings]," who founded Pure, and would go on to become the founder of Netflix.

In interviews, the best thing to be is sincere.

McCord remembers interviewing Ted Sarandos back when Netflix was exclusively a DVD-by-mail business.

Sarandos has become a star at Netflix, rising to the role of chief content officer. Along with Hastings, Sarandos is the architect of Netflix's film-production strategy, which has made the company less dependent on Hollywood, even as its original movies and TV shows become huge hits in their own right. Now, Sarandos hobnobs with the biggest names in film and TV.

But back in 2000, Sarandos was a vice president at a chain of video-rental stores and seemed the unlikeliest of future movie moguls when he interviewed with McCord. But she remembers he had two attributes that stood out from the other candidates.

"So, I had been interviewing people for Ted’s job," McCord recalled. "And they were just nauseating. All they did was name drop. I remember one guy said,: 'Yeah I just came down from the city and I was having lunch with Francis Ford Coppola and yesterday I was out at Lucas Ranch cause George and I are like this.' I looked at him and said 'I slept with Bill Gates.' And he said 'Did you?' And I go, 'No, but you didn’t have lunch with Francisco Coppola either. Why are we having this stupid conversation?"

Sarandos took a different tact.

"I finished interviewing Ted and we're standing in the hallway waiting for Reed to get out of a meeting," McCord recalled. "And Ted’s telling me that his son is going to his first dance and I go 'Oh man, are they going to disco? And then Ted starts singing Disco Duck and we’re dancing in the hallways. Reed comes out and says 'Oh, you guys have met.' Ted is sincere and genuine."

Be obsessive about knowing everything about your job and company.

In the early days, nobody at Netflix was like Sarandos, McCord said. He was a true film aficionado. He understood everything about the home-video market.

"Ted had Hollywood in his veins," McCord said. "He was that guy in the video store. He was that guy in the mom and pop store that knew every single movie and watched them obsessively while he was behind the counter."

McCord said that Sarandos didn't come in knowing much about tech. He wasn't an engineer but with him and what he was asked to do, it didn't matter.

"What impressed me about interviewing him was that he totally got what we were trying to do, deeply," McCord said. "He knew what consumers wanted and he understood about how to make the experience better."

Things have changed. Get used to it and practice interviewing.

Be flexible and expect change, McCord counsels.

She says that companies won't typically hold it against you if you've moved around, but don't expect any lifetime positions either. She says it's best for everyone keep their interviewing skills sharp.

"We don’t expect tenure," McCord said. "We’re more practiced at doing interviews and being interviewed because we do it more. But you can always do better. Practice."

For people who work in HR: Most parts of a company think about innovation. You need to as well.

McCord says human resource departments haven't evolved much from when she first started. She bristles that some HR execs see themselves as hall monitors or cruise directors--either making sure everyone behaves themselves, or ensuring everyone is having fun.

"I lived under a rock for 14 years at Netflix and just did my thing," McCord said "When I left I said I’ll go see what other people are doing... I bet there are some really interesting innovations going on. You know, I was floored. Intuit gave up annual reviews and everybody was experimenting with five kinds of salad and eight flavors of water."

She says she's talked to HR execs at other companies who don't even have a solid grip on what it is that the company does.

Now, she advises that HR people start looking at their job the same way that people do in every other area of the company.

"Everybody else in every other function in the company thinks about innovation all the time," she said. "Finance has to be clever because of the new kinds of payment methods and global currency and financial control systems and the software is very sophisticated and all that stuff is pretty involved. Marketing people use SEO now and it’s complex and data driven and important...and HR people just copy each other, for years. If we at Netflix had said 'Well, you know, let’s do what everybody else does but only do it a smidge better. What would have happened?

"The whole thing just makes me crazy," McCord continued. "When HR people tell me I want a seat at the table I’m like 'Alright, first of all here’s how you get one: You earn it like everybody else. You do not go sitting at that table and go blabbing in HR speak because no one is going to listen to you. You got to learn the language of a business, understand deeply how it works. I was part of my business. My opinion mattered. Anyway, that’s where I think we’ve lost our way."

McCord spoke 'HR babble' until Hastings broke her of the habit.

McCord says that HR execs tend to throw around complicated sounding jargon because of their insecurities that nobody in management takes them seriously.

She knows this because she was once guilty of it. At Pure Software, Reed Hastings helped her rid herself of the habit.

"Three weeks after I started I came in to see Reed and wanted to talk to him about some esoteric thing that I always thought cool people talked about," McCord said, "He said 'Actually, seriously don’t darken my door. I got software to build. I only hired you cause you have a skill and the only one I care about and that’s recruiting.'

"My heart was broken," said continued. "I came to do esoteric job-creation metrics. He was the one who stripped me of my ability to speak HR. He just wouldn’t tolerate it. He said 'Stop with the language that no one understands. You do know that you sound stupid, right?' This is when Reed wasn’t the polished man you know now."

With upper management, HR wins respect only by being right.

The core of Netflix's management team stayed largely intact for more than a decade. McCord said it was a group of intelligent, hyper-competitive and data-driven people — especially Barry McCarthy, Netflix's then-CFO, Neal Hunt, chief technology officer, and Leslie Kilgore, chief marketing officer.

She knew winning respect in this group as an HR pro wouldn't be easy.

"With Barry, Reed, Neal and Leslie if it didn’t have a number attached to it, it didn’t matter. I had to gain credibility by using those perceptive skills and observation data so I could say 'Ok maybe this is the 27th time (an employee) has done the same thing in the same circumstances, so I think that’s who we have. I had to be right a lot and I was."

One time, after a company party, McCord said McCarthy paid her a compliment.

"He says 'You know you have like this sixth sense," McCord recalled. "'When we’re in a interview you tell me someone is not going to work out and I argue and hire them anyway, and 100 percent of the time you’re right and I’m wrong.'"

In her view, it was a fair compliment. She recalls telling McCarthy that it's true — in the same way that his skill at pattern recognition helps him with accounting and finance, she believes she has the same sense of patterns with people.

For founders: Even when competition for talent is tough, you still must say 'no.'

McCord advises startup founders and she tells them to consider using one specific word more often: 'No.'

She suggests that companies in the tech sector have coddled employees for too long. She said good people want direction and high standards established.

As an example, she cited former Yahoo CEO Marissa Meyer's then-controversial decision to end most types of remote work at the company. Meyer caught a lot of flack for it at the time, but McCord says it was the right thing to do — Yahoo employees were interviewing at Netflix, and all of them said that they had no sense of the company's strategy or culture.

"From a company perspective, I thought, 'rock on Marissa. Get everybody back to work.'"

She says that Google may have coddled employees too much.

Google recently wrestled with an employee revolt, as many workers threatened to quit if the company didn't stop work on Project Maven, a pilot program with the Pentagon. Google largely yielded to their demands and promised to never make AI for weapons.

McCord had mixed feelings about that.

"I might go 'Okay, quit. Go work someplace else. Life will go on. Okay, so you disagree. You have every right to disagree. We heard you. We made the decision. We’re management. If you want to work for a company that doesn’t work with the government then find one.

"I was always really clear [at Netflix]," she continued. "Maybe that’s the old school in me. This is work. This is not home. You are not a child. We don’t take care of you. You own your career. Please come to work with other smart people and produce great stuff for our customers. That’s what we do here. We can have fun and we can celebrate and do all the happy s--t but we’re not everything to you. Google kept the life-after-the-dorm around way past the shelf life."

But McCord also said that when she was at Netflix, management believed that they had to set an example and behave consistently with the values they had established for the company. And maybe, by promising to never make AI for weapons, that's what Google's management did, she says.

On the topic of diversity, McCord says there's no excuse not to hire more women and people of color.

Another area where McCord takes companies in Silicon Valley to task is for not diversifying their workforce.

She doesn't buy the excuses. She says in addition to the credit Netflix has received for the diversity in its programming, such as the TV series "Luke Cage," she notes that Netflix's staff in Los Angeles is very diverse. She says the trick may be to hunt for candidates in different talent pools.

"We are so damn insular," McCord said. "If you think the only right candidate comes from a top-10 university, then you’re eliminating a lot of people. If you’re recruiting from only the top tech companies then you’re only finding white men. It's saturated with the same kind of people."

She urges you instead to go outside your comfort zone in finding candidates — something that companies in Texas or the midwest often seem to be better at than those in Silicon Valley, she says.

Don't become nostalgic, and keep reinventing yourself.

Asked whether she and Hastings ever reminisce about Netflix's startup period, or the Blockbuster fight she said, "that shark only swims forward. He never pines for the old days."

Before the interview with Business Insider McCord also made a special request.

"Don't call me a former Netflix anything," she said. "I wrote the book so I would have a new title other than former blah-blah. I don’t want to be the former head of HR. I love my Netflix memories. It’s the best job I ever had. I made a huge difference. I was part of an amazing team. It has made me a wealthy woman and made me gloriously happy but it’s a long time ago and the life I lead now is absolutely fabulous."