Sam Altman’s hiring strategy bets on talent, not age

• Sam Altman says he prioritizes talent over age in his hiring decisions.
• He said having a mix of inexperienced and experienced workers is important for tech companies.
• The job market in Big Tech is increasingly polarized with many job seekers facing a bleak outlook.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says his hiring strategy is focused on talent over age.

On an episode of Harry Stebbings’s “The Twenty Minute VC (20VC)” podcast, the OpenAI CEO said that companies are best served by hiring a mix of younger, inexperienced people and more experienced people over 30.

“Inexperienced does not inherently mean not valuable,” he said during the podcast episode published on November 4. Altman added it was worth taking a chance on young, high-potential people at the start of their careers as they could end up delivering high value.

At the same time, Altman said he wouldn’t be comfortable relying on an inexperienced employee who was just starting out for higher-stakes work, such as designing complex and expensive systems.

“You want both, and I think what you really want is just like an extremely high talent bar of people at any age, ” Altman said. “A strategy that says ‘I’m only going to hire younger people,’ or ‘I’m only going to hire older people,’ I believe, would be misguided.”

The job market in Big Tech has become an increasingly polarized space with companies fighting over C-suite-level AI talent, while mid-level and junior employees are facing a more bleak hiring outlook.

Big Tech has been engaged in a talent war for top AI researchers amid an industry-wide AI arms race. In one recent example, Google struck a $2.7 billion deal with AI startup Character.ai., reportedly largely to rehire former Googler Noam Shazeer.

In a similar move, Microsoft previously paid Inflection $650 million for a licensing deal and to poach its founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karen Simonyan.

However, the battle for high-level talent may not be translating down to more junior employees.

The job market appears to have tightened for more junior roles, with recent graduates recently telling BI that they are facing a tough job market. They blame the rise of AI, offshoring, and tech layoffs for making roles more competitive.

In a recent survey of 750 workers struggling to find work in the US, BI found over a dozen recent college graduates said they can’t find a tech role, despite relevant internships and bachelor’s degrees from top schools.

While Altman may prioritize talent over age at OpenAI, some older tech employees say they are experiencing ageism in the workforce. They told BI they are more at risk of layoffs or have already aged out of tech roles.

Gen Zers have also previously told BI they experience negative stereotyping in the workplace because they’re perceived as “lazy.” One 25-year-old worker said they felt they were denied promotions because of their age.