Best Hiring Practices

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/06/mba-mondays-best-hiring-practices.html

by followmylee • 14 years ago

79 28 14 years ago

The first step in opening up a position for hiring is to define the position you are looking for. Most companies call this a job specification (or spec).

I'm still shocked at the number of employers who don't create one before they start looking for somebody. Especially those who don't think about how the new hire will fit into the existing organisation.

For example, I've seen this pattern multiple times.

a) Lead Developer (let's call 'em Mary) gets massively overloaded. No time to do the numerous things she's asked to do.

2) "We need another Mary" is as far as the job spec goes.

3) They find "Bob" who is, indeed, mostly another Mary. Bob gets pulled off onto NewFunProject, since Mary is waist deep in keeping CoreCompanyProduct running. Pattern repeats.

4) Mary rapidly gets rather annoyed that Bob gets to play with all the fun new projects, and promptly finds herself a nice new job. Walking away with a head's worth of CoreCompanyProduct that never got to Bob.

5) Bob gets massively overloaded. Goto 2.

Hiring is not what you should do to fix a short term problem.

balloot• 14 years ago

The fundamental problem in your example has nothing to do with hiring. It's that Mary is working on something that she dislikes to the point that having to continue on her project in the medium term will cause her to quit. It's both the company and the employee's joint responsibility to ensure that this isn't the case.

adrianhoward3• 14 years ago

I'd argue that it has everything to do with poor hiring practices :-) I should have made it clearer that at (a) you have a happy, but overloaded employee.

By hiring somebody else, and by not thinking it through what that person should do in the context of the current workforce, a happy employee becomes an unhappy one.

Before they hired Bob - before they even start looking for a Bob - they should have had a good idea what "Bob" would be doing, how that's going to fit in with what Mary's doing now, and that everybody is happy with that.

Nobody went in with the idea that "Mary will get the dull stuff and Bob will get the neat stuff" since that's obviously a dumb decision. But because nobody had articulated what exactly Bob should be doing, and how that may or may interact with Mary's role, bad things happened.

If they'd thought about it, written a job spec, and talked to Mary some of these issues would have come up. They would have probably figured out that "We need another Mary" wasn't what they actually needed. When a company is growing "another Mary" is almost always the wrong thing to ask for - since as the company grows roles change.

By looking to define the role they would have found out that Mary does Q, W, X, Y, & Z. She's not very hot at Q since it's not a core skill, but she's really passionate about X, Y and Z, and W needs to get done and she's happy to do it. So maybe what the company needs is for Mary to focus on X, Y & Z, and get somebody else who's good at Q and W... or two different people who are good at Q and W.... or some other option.

Hiring is exactly what makes this happen - and I've seen it more than once.

geebee• 14 years ago

Defining the position is an interesting challenge. I've certainly been frustrated as a candidate in the past. I've been through eight hour technical interviews, going from dev to manager to dev for an hour each, solving math puzzles, traversing trees, coding up design patterns, optimizing sql, and realizing, at the end of the day, that after eight hours I actually have no idea what the company does beyond the questions I asked and the material I read on their website. Part of the problem was that the interviewers weren't coordinating well, so everyone was pretty much just hammering me with tech questions. Hell, at lunch someone thought it would be clever to ask me how to swap two integers without creating a third integer.

Here's the thing - I actually do understand why companies do this. Many well funded, established companies are just in a state of constant recruitment. If you can solve math problems, write efficient data structures, optimize sql, withstand the pressure of coding on the spot, and seem like a pleasant enough person to be around, they'll have something for you to do. Hire. Step 1 to tech recruitment is to constantly scan who is on the market, identify those who have good credentials and can withstand brutal technical screenings, and make sure you hire them before facebook and google do. You have a few weeks to do this. Step 2 is to define the position you are looking for, and if you wait too long, you won't have time to do step 1. It actually does make some sense.

I would recommend a happy medium, because I really didn't want to work for that company after a day of wind sprints, never knowing where I was going or why I was going there. I think that what they want, and get, is whip-smart people who live for technical problems, with perhaps less emphasis on the business context.

adrianhoward3• 14 years ago

Many employees don't know how to interview and you should teach them the basics as well as educate them on what you are looking to learn from their interview

If you're in the position of doing interviews for the first time, and don't have anybody around to teach you the basics, I would thoroughly recommend getting a copy of Lou Adler's book "Hire With Your Head". It has some really excellent advice on how to approach interviewing, and the hiring process in general.

There's a brief article on Adler's site that covers accomplishment based interviewing that you can find at http://www.adlerconcepts.com/resources/column/interviewing/u....

Having a focus on accomplishment based questions - drilling down into a candidates' experiences on real projects - is a hugely useful technique. Talking about the work in detail helps you separate candidates that interview well from those with real skills.

fredwilson5• 14 years ago

that is great advice. thanks!

dgant• 14 years ago

Wilson suggests contacting references not provided by the candidate. That can be a major breach of privacy.

When people are looking for jobs -- particularly while employed elsewhere -- they are entitled to do so discreetly. If employer-directed reference checks are a requirement, candidates should be made completely aware of that and be given an opportunity to opt out. If that halts the hiring process, that's fine. At least the applicant retains control of his or her privacy.

krschultz3• 14 years ago

Agreed. I've backed out of the job application process for a company rather than give a reference at my current employer before a written offer was on the table. What if I burn the bridges with people at my company, and then I don't like the offer presented by the hiring company?

bostonpete2• 14 years ago

> give a reference at my current employer before a written offer was on the table.

Does that mean to imply that you have given a reference to a current employer after getting a written offer? Why would the new company want a reference at that point?

beagle3• 14 years ago

> Wilson suggests contacting references not provided by the candidate. That can be a major breach of privacy.

He mentions it casually, so I don't know what exactly he meant.

I know that I did as he recommended -- but before I contacted a reference not provided by the candidate, I asked them if it was ok to make that contact. In most cases, the answer is "sure, go ahead", or "that's ok, I guess". When the answer is "I rather you wouldn't", the story is often interesting and relevant to your hiring decision.

jaylevitt• 14 years ago

Conversely... I know a guy who worked with a well-known startup founder, but he didn't list that founder as a reference, because he was sure he'd burned his bridges. Just so happened that the hiring manager had the founder on speed-dial. Later that night, the manager calls the founder, who says: "If I were to start a new company right now, that's the guy I'd want with me."

You never know.

fredwilson5• 14 years ago

yup.

Spooky23• 14 years ago

That practice sounds like a great way to get sued.

fredwilson5• 14 years ago

i don't care. i am not going to hire anyone (or invest in anyone) without making phone calls. i don't think anyone should. but the quid pro quo, as you suggest, is don't call the current employer. great point on that.

Peroni3• 14 years ago

A lot of this post is eerily similar to one of my old blog posts: http://voltsteve.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/why-should-i-join-yo...

I'm not claiming the author lifted any of the content but I am curious as to whether or not he/she had read my post in the past?

krschultz3• 14 years ago

Wait, you don't know who the author is and you call yourself a tech recruiter?

Fred Wilson has invested in what, 100 tech companies? He has been writing MBA Monday's posts for years. This post has multiple hundreds of comments on it. There are probably hundreds of retweets and comments on Twitter about it (you know, another company he invested in).

I'm pretty sure he didn't need your blog post to give advice on hiring.

bostonpete2• 14 years ago

Hey, it could happen. After all, Google stole my idea to make a self-driving car.

Peroni3• 14 years ago

...and you call yourself a tech recruiter?

Actually I don't call myself a tech recruiter. Haven't done so in a while. That's a very old blog post and I am well aware of who the author is. A highly public personality doesn't preclude you to taking inspiration from other sources.

fredwilson5• 14 years ago

i hadn't read your post until now. but it is very good and covers a lot of the same ground. thanks for pointing it out.

Peroni3• 14 years ago

Not to worry Fred. I partly guessed it was co-incidence as the topic is relatively linear if you know how to do it right which you obviously do.

cletus• 14 years ago

> A HR professional can identify the candidates who don't come close to meeting the requirements of the job and filter them out.

In my experience this is mostly not true. Most HR people don't know tech so what the HR screen devolves into is cramming your CV with acronyms so you make it pass the HR grep filter.

> You will want to interview a decent number of folks for every position.

If you're bringing in more than five people for onsite interviews then (IMHO) you're doing it wrong. You're wasting your time and theirs and it's clear to me that you don't know what you're looking for.

At least Fred advocates phone/video screens (of 15 minutes) although he suggests 6-12 onsite candidates.

> Many employees don't know how to interview and you should teach them the basics ...

This is true but I would go further: most people shouldn't interview. It's arguably a talent not a skill. At Google, it's viewed as every engineer's responsibility to do interviews and I disagree with this. Many of the stories of bad interview experiences can be attributed--at least in part--to people who just don't have the interest or talent in interviewing.

Anecdote: in one quarter I once took 10 people to lunch as part of their interview slate. In those lunches I just talked about the company, answered their questions, etc but didn't get into any technical discussions.

Of those 10 I predicted 8 wouldn't get offers, 1 would and 1 I was borderline. Actual results: 1 offer, 9 no offers putting me at 9-10 out of 10.

> If you connect to the candidate on LinkedIn, you can quickly figure out who you know that knows them.

What an incestuous world the NY/SF tech scene must be if this is true. Well it might be true if you're a veteran VC. I can't see it being true for anyone else.

Otherwise this is all straightforward good advice although it skips the most important step: how to determine if someone is a good fit and competent but that's a topic we'll probably argue about in perpetuity.

theorique• 14 years ago

What an incestuous world the NY/SF tech scene must be if this is true. Well it might be true if you're a veteran VC. I can't see it being true for anyone else.

Tech is a pretty small world in general. These hubs may have more people overall, but they are also highly involved, highly connected people. A degree or two of separation is very, very common.

rdl• 14 years ago

1) I could tolerate HR screening for completely random people, who apply via a web form or cold email. Of course, I don't think I have ever hired or seen someone hired that way.

Anyone who comes in as a referral (from investors, employees, friends, etc.) shouldn't be speaking to anyone in HR until after an offer letter is signed. The only possible exception would be having HR handle travel arrangements for on-site interview, but even that should probably be handled by whoever does travel for the team in general (or the hiring manager if everyone normally does it themselves).

HR involvement will basically add zero value AND screen against your most competent 10% of candidates.

I'd probably walk out if an HR person talked to me, or someone tried to put HR in as a gatekeeper. I have met a couple of minimally competent HR people ever, and many more who were criminally incompetent.

2) 2-3 interviews with multiple people in each can work. It really depends on the role. What I'd probably prefer is 2 real interviews with 1-3 people in each, and then lunch where you get to meet a bunch more people casually (and basically be sold on the company), and then after lunch, an interview with founders (if they weren't in already). You can short circuit and send people home after the morning meetings if they're horrible, and after lunch if they're not-hire-now-but-maybe-in-the-future-or-may-have-competent-friends.

fredwilson5• 14 years ago

great comment. this is part of a series of MBA Mondays posts i called "People". earlier in the series I wrote about cultural fit. http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/05/mba-mondays-culture-and-fit....

tokenadult• 14 years ago

From the submitted article: "The first step in opening up a position for hiring is to define the position you are looking for. Most companies call this a job specification (or spec)."

But then the article, which after all is titled, "Best Hiring Practices," doesn't go into detail about how to use that information to build a good hiring procedure to screen in the best applicants for each job. There are many discussions here on HN about company hiring procedures. From participants in earlier discussions I have learned about many useful references on the subject, which I have gathered here in a FAQ file. The review article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274

http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...

sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews for job experience, checks for academic credentials, and so on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.

The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work reasonably well (but only about at the 0.5 level, standing alone). One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the job if hired. Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general cognitive ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring processes.

For legal reasons in the United States (the same legal reason does not apply in other countries), it is difficult to give job applicants general mental ability tests as a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents' generation) as a routine part of hiring procedures. The Griggs v. Duke Power, 401 U.S. 424 (1971) case in the United States Supreme Court

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196...

held that general intelligence tests used in hiring that could have a "disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ tests, in a hiring procedure had best conduct a specific validation study of the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring procedure could be challenged as illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on some job applicants. A company defending a brain-teaser test for hiring would have to defend it by showing it is supported by a validation study demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job. Such validation studies can be quite expensive. (Companies outside the United States are regulated by different laws. One other big difference between the United States and other countries is the relative ease with which workers may be fired in the United States, allowing companies to correct hiring mistakes by terminating the employment of the workers they hired mistakenly. The more legal protections a worker has from being fired, the more careful companies have to be about hiring in the first place.)

The social background to the legal environment in the United States is explained in many books about hiring procedures

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-GZkw6...

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWl...

Previous discussion on HN pointed out that the Schmidt & Hunter (1998) article showed that multi-factor procedures work better than single-factor procedures, a summary of that article we can find in the current professional literature, in "Reasons for being selective when choosing personnel selection procedures" (2010) by Cornelius J. König, Ute-Christine Klehe, Matthias Berchtold, and Martin Kleinmann:

"Choosing personnel selection procedures could be so simple: Grab your copy of Schmidt and Hunter (1998) and read their Table 1 (again). This should remind you to use a general mental ability (GMA) test in combination with an integrity test, a structured interview, a work sample test, and/or a conscientiousness measure."

http://geb.uni-giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri...

But the 2010 article notes, looking at actual practice of companies around the world, "However, this idea does not seem to capture what is actually happening in organizations, as practitioners worldwide often use procedures with low predictive validity and regularly ignore procedures that are more valid (e.g., Di Milia, 2004; Lievens & De Paepe, 2004; Ryan, McFarland, Baron, & Page, 1999; Scholarios & Lockyer, 1999; Schuler, Hell, Trapmann, Schaar, & Boramir, 2007; Taylor, Keelty, & McDonnell, 2002). For example, the highly valid work sample tests are hardly used in the US, and the potentially rather useless procedure of graphology (Dean, 1992; Neter & Ben-Shakhar, 1989) is applied somewhere between occasionally and often in France (Ryan et al., 1999). In Germany, the use of GMA tests is reported to be low and to be decreasing (i.e., only 30% of the companies surveyed by Schuler et al., 2007, now use them)."

temphn• 14 years ago

tokenadult, this might be your best post ever and shows that you are aware of the literature on IQ, its predictive validity, and the legal difficulties around using it explicitly (though implicitly everyone is looking for smart people). Admit to being puzzled as to how this squares with the general thrust of your comments on other topics, which seem to skew more nurturist than naturist.

cldrope• 14 years ago

How often is this guy going to keep posting his own articles on here? It seems that almost as often as he WRITES articles they are posted here.

Protip: None are really very good.

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