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Lesson 6: Three Principles for Systematically Hiring the Right People | Atul Gawande
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November 11, 2025
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November 11, 2025
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5:18Now PlayingNew job seekers often find themselves stuck in a frustrating loop: you need experience to get a job, but you need a job to get experience. The culprit? Entry-level job listings that require five or more years of experience. Or even more extreme: postings that ask for more years of experience with a software than the software has existed. Surgeon Atul Gawande offers a better way forward for applicants and hiring managers.
In this video lesson, he offers advice on creating hiring practices that prioritizes intentionality and clarity.
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About Atul Gawande:
Atul Gawande, MD, MPH is a renowned surgeon, author, and public health leader whose work explores how humans design and improve systems for better outcomes in complex environments. He is Professor of the Practice of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and holds the John and Cyndy Fish Chair in Surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He also serves as Distinguished Professor in Residence at Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation at Brigham and Women’s and the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, which he co-founded and formerly chaired.
From January 2022 to January 2025, he served as Assistant Administrator for Global Health at USAID. Gawande also co-founded Lifebox, a nonprofit organization making surgery and anesthesia safer worldwide. From 2018-2020, he was CEO of Haven, the Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase healthcare venture.
A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, Gawande is the author of the best-selling books Complications (a National Book Award finalist), Better, The Checklist Manifesto, and Being Mortal. He is the winner of two National Magazine Awards, AcademyHealth’s Impact Award for highest research impact on healthcare, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the Lewis Thomas Award for writing about science.
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