The biggest YouTube creator on the platform has lifted the lid on what it takes to be hired for his channel.
MrBeast became the most subscribed channel on YouTube in June 2024 with over 300 million followers.
The content creator is well known for his unique and high-quality videos, often involving people taking part in contests for large sums of cash.
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Popular videos of his have gone viral including his recreation of Netflix’s Squid Game and a competition where the last person to leave a circle wins half a million dollars.
The creator behind the popular channel, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, has now revealed the deal breaker questions he uses when hiring someone new.
In an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, Donaldson shared his thoughts on the qualities he looks for during the hiring process.
He said: “The big thing is, especially in this content creation, cause it's not like anything that's done on Netflix or different content mediums, I really need people who are coachable, and really see the value in what I care about because it's a very specific way of going about things.
“If Netflix wanted to hire someone to do a documentary, there's probably tens of thousands of people you could hire that have worked on documentaries before. But if you wanna hire someone to make super viral YouTube videos, like we do, there's just no one you can really pull from.
“Sometimes, I'll hire people from game shows, right? They have all these preconceived notions about pacing and how a video should be, and you have to spend the first year breaking all these habits.”
Donaldson goes on to discuss the difficulty of hiring people who are used to work on traditional media.
He continued: “For me, it's almost easier to hire people that are just hard workers, that are obsessed, and really coachable, and just train 'em how to be good at content creation and production, than to hire someone from like traditional, which is the only way to really do it cause there's not that many YouTube channels that have scaled up, so it's not like there's a huge talent pool of people who've worked on YouTube channels.”
Talking about questions he asks when hiring someone knew, the YouTuber added: “There's people that will come on and you'll ask 'em, ‘What do you wanna be doing in five years?’ And instead of saying, ‘Oh, I want to be working on this channel,’ they'll be like, ‘Oh, I hope to be working on movies,’ or this or that. And they see working on a YouTube channel
as a launchpad to go into traditional, and it's like, ‘No, you just don't get it’.
“This is the end goal. This is your career. And so, I'm just so tired of having those kinds of conversations.”
MrBeast goes on to say that if a candidate doesn’t answer the question about future work with ‘making content on YouTube’ then he won’t hire them.
“If their answer is anything like movies or traditional stuff like that, it's just a hell no,” he warned.