Why I do not conduct interviews
Translation of Jason Freedman's article "Everyone Sucks at Interviewing. Everyone." The original article can be read here .
The idea of interviewing for employment seems to me vicious and meaningless. Each employer blindly follows a standard path consisting of posting vacancies, processing resumes and interviewing candidates without ever wondering if this is really what he needs. I believe that this standard way is completely inapplicable in today's realities.
For the past few years I have studied with great interest everything related to the selection and recruitment of employees. Finding a good specialist is incredibly difficult, and I can hardly name many companies that do it well. Even the most successful companies in this regard have a terrible secret, which is the following: no matter how well the selection process is organized, it still cannot guarantee that the hired employee will succeed in the new place. It is rumored that even the most complex candidate assessment systems used by Google’s HR department are not able to accurately predict the effectiveness of a future employee. Some companies note that the only indicator that somehow correlates with the success of young developers is their results in the SAT test (the US equivalent of the USE) .
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According to Paul English (Paul English), the technical director of the Kayak company, which develops an online platform for booking hotels and air tickets, he has to fire every third hired employee - and he thinks this is a pretty good indicator!
That is, the head of the company, who has many years of experience working with candidates, still makes mistakes in 33 percent of cases? That's bad! But you should not forget that Kayak is a large and stable company, and parting with one or two employees, as a rule, does not create any particular problems for it. But many startups, because of the instability of the situations in which they work, cannot so easily dismiss an inefficient employee.
"We have the first release on our nose, we cannot afford to throw one person out of the team ..."
“Investors have just started financing, the dismissal will cause many questions ...”
"Let's give it another three months and see what happens ..."
I do not claim that I am a guru in finding and hiring good employees. But I can share with you a simple technique that I successfully use.
I do not conduct interviews. Totally.
I believe that the recruitment process should be similar to courting a girl before starting a serious relationship. A good working relationship is best to start by working together for a while. Before taking (or not taking) a person to work, I do a small joint project with him. I try to allocate tasks for such projects that can be completed in a few weeks and the results of which are clearly visible and easily measurable. I pay for the work done under this project at the rates of the average contract specialist.
If the candidate completes his project as excellent, he receives a job application from us. At this point, we are no longer asking questions about what qualifications this person has and what tasks can be given to him: we have already tested him in action. The candidate at this moment also knows all the pros and cons of our company and the style of work of our team. And he will accept (or will not accept) our job offer, perfectly imagining all our features.
And it happens that the candidate does not cope with the project. Then we wish him all the best and in addition give him a couple of tips on how to find the position that suits him best. And we safely miss all the bureaucracy associated with the dismissal of a person from the state, do not spend half a year on fruitless attempts to work together or “pull up” an employee and avoid uncomfortable conversations about his fate behind closed doors.
It happens that for some reason a candidate who is interested in us cannot allocate three weeks for a pilot project. In this case, we are trying to find a smaller project, which can be done in the evenings and on weekends, or we are looking for an opensource project that is interesting for both of us, or we offer the employee to take a three-day vacation at the main job in order to get five full working days with weekends. You can spend on our project. Those candidates who are still studying at the university, we offer to work with us during the holidays. Well, if the candidate cannot find the right amount of time, then we, alas, say goodbye to him, wish him all the best, and, if possible, give him recommendations where to go.
But we never, never conduct tedious interviews with puzzles for intelligence and questions on algorithms. Why? Yes, because neither one nor the other is useful to a person when working with us.
My position is this: the only true way to select cool specialists is trial projects that they carry out on a contract basis. This approach is gradually gaining popularity among startups, and it seems to me that both startups themselves and their future employees only benefit from this. For large companies, this technique is of little interest: their HR departments are accustomed to more formal processes and are unlikely to abandon them in the near future. But small companies definitely should at least try to change their approach to the selection of employees.
The idea of interviewing for employment seems to me vicious and meaningless. Each employer blindly follows a standard path consisting of posting vacancies, processing resumes and interviewing candidates without ever wondering if this is really what he needs. I believe that this standard way is completely inapplicable in today's realities.
For the past few years I have studied with great interest everything related to the selection and recruitment of employees. Finding a good specialist is incredibly difficult, and I can hardly name many companies that do it well. Even the most successful companies in this regard have a terrible secret, which is the following: no matter how well the selection process is organized, it still cannot guarantee that the hired employee will succeed in the new place. It is rumored that even the most complex candidate assessment systems used by Google’s HR department are not able to accurately predict the effectiveness of a future employee. Some companies note that the only indicator that somehow correlates with the success of young developers is their results in the SAT test (the US equivalent of the USE) .
')
According to Paul English (Paul English), the technical director of the Kayak company, which develops an online platform for booking hotels and air tickets, he has to fire every third hired employee - and he thinks this is a pretty good indicator!
That is, the head of the company, who has many years of experience working with candidates, still makes mistakes in 33 percent of cases? That's bad! But you should not forget that Kayak is a large and stable company, and parting with one or two employees, as a rule, does not create any particular problems for it. But many startups, because of the instability of the situations in which they work, cannot so easily dismiss an inefficient employee.
"We have the first release on our nose, we cannot afford to throw one person out of the team ..."
“Investors have just started financing, the dismissal will cause many questions ...”
"Let's give it another three months and see what happens ..."
I do not claim that I am a guru in finding and hiring good employees. But I can share with you a simple technique that I successfully use.
I do not conduct interviews. Totally.
I believe that the recruitment process should be similar to courting a girl before starting a serious relationship. A good working relationship is best to start by working together for a while. Before taking (or not taking) a person to work, I do a small joint project with him. I try to allocate tasks for such projects that can be completed in a few weeks and the results of which are clearly visible and easily measurable. I pay for the work done under this project at the rates of the average contract specialist.
If the candidate completes his project as excellent, he receives a job application from us. At this point, we are no longer asking questions about what qualifications this person has and what tasks can be given to him: we have already tested him in action. The candidate at this moment also knows all the pros and cons of our company and the style of work of our team. And he will accept (or will not accept) our job offer, perfectly imagining all our features.
And it happens that the candidate does not cope with the project. Then we wish him all the best and in addition give him a couple of tips on how to find the position that suits him best. And we safely miss all the bureaucracy associated with the dismissal of a person from the state, do not spend half a year on fruitless attempts to work together or “pull up” an employee and avoid uncomfortable conversations about his fate behind closed doors.
It happens that for some reason a candidate who is interested in us cannot allocate three weeks for a pilot project. In this case, we are trying to find a smaller project, which can be done in the evenings and on weekends, or we are looking for an opensource project that is interesting for both of us, or we offer the employee to take a three-day vacation at the main job in order to get five full working days with weekends. You can spend on our project. Those candidates who are still studying at the university, we offer to work with us during the holidays. Well, if the candidate cannot find the right amount of time, then we, alas, say goodbye to him, wish him all the best, and, if possible, give him recommendations where to go.
But we never, never conduct tedious interviews with puzzles for intelligence and questions on algorithms. Why? Yes, because neither one nor the other is useful to a person when working with us.
My position is this: the only true way to select cool specialists is trial projects that they carry out on a contract basis. This approach is gradually gaining popularity among startups, and it seems to me that both startups themselves and their future employees only benefit from this. For large companies, this technique is of little interest: their HR departments are accustomed to more formal processes and are unlikely to abandon them in the near future. But small companies definitely should at least try to change their approach to the selection of employees.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/285464/
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