The Cookbook: Finding and Hiring People (part 2)
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This is the part 2 in the section about finding and hiring talent in a hearty company. Check out the previous section with the button above. And click here read from the start.
People are passionate only about jobs they love. And jobs they love are the jobs their personality, intellect, skill, habits, worldview and most importantly their mindset is a good fit for. Every job role has a certain fit. Some people fit it, some don’t. What you hope to find is the closest fit amongst the people you get sufficiently interested to apply for the role.
#1 and #2 are about pinning down the requirements for the fit. When you need to hire people your first action should be to define the job role. Create a detailed list of tasks that the person doing the job will do. Without this list the job advertisement will be wrong, which will lead to the wrong people applying (or too many applying) and at the end you will not be able to test the candidates for the fit.
#3 of having a filter in the application process is a neat trick to check for the fit earlier on in the application process. There are many ways to do this and you need to think of one that works for your industry or job role. Our trick in a typical software job post would be to ask the applicant to solve a certain programming problem and apply with the answer to the problem, or for quality assurance job posts we might put in some typos and ask them to tell us what was wrong with the job post. The beauty of this filtering tricks is that it immediately cuts out people I call the “robo-applicants”, people who are not really interested about your job in particular (hence pretty good chance they are not a good fit) but are applying just because it’s easy to send an email. This early filtering also gives you hints about the candidates who might be a good fit but would otherwise have been rejected for their poorly construed resume or cover letter. This is usually a big problem in engineering and technical jobs. One of the best developers we ever hired at Kaz was someone who had sent a poorly formatted Word document CV that misspelled most of the technologies he had worked in. Yet his email had the right subject line deciphered from our cryptic instructions of how to submit the CV, which I give below:
Please email with your resume with a short description of why this job is right for you ZW1haWwgc3ViamVjdCBzaG91bGQgYmU6ICJOZXh0IFN0ZXZlIEpvYnMi
This may look like some kind of error in the copy but to the people we were interested in it was just a base64 encrypted string that said - email subject should be: "Next Steve Jobs". All they had to do was use an online decoder to find that string and put that into the email subject. An instant free and crowdsourced filtering for us! Obviously base64 encrypted instruction might not be the right thing for your industry but you can always think of something similar that does this kind of filter early on in the application process.
The audio only interview of #4 is important for a low cost filtering but also more importantly to assess someone without any visual ques. We get biased by visual factors, how a candidate looks, how she dresses, how she smiles, etc. There are considerable data to prove that we tend to like and thus hire people who look or behave like us. A classic in this area is chapter on liking in Robert Cialdini’s book Influence the psychology of persuasion where he relates:
In one study, done in the early 1970s when young people tended to dress either in “hippie” or “straight” fashion, experimenters donned hippie or straight attire and asked college students on campus for a dime to make a phone call. When the experimenter was dressed in the same way as the student, the request was granted in more than two thirds of the instances; but when the student and requester were dissimilarly dressed, the dime was provided less than half the time. [The dime-request experiment was conducted by Emswiller et al. (1971)]
Impressive clothing, posture or even sometimes perfume can bias our decisions. An audio interview reduces the chances of this bias during the initial phases of filtering candidates.
#5 is about avoiding the classic mistake many make. The candidate you are considering must actually do the tasks she is supposed to do during the interview rather than talk about those tasks. This is the only way to really judge if the candidate is a good fit or not. It’s easy to say how you would do something theoretically, answer interview questions that are mostly leaked on sites out there but unless the candidate actually does some of the tasks, you will never know how good or bad she is at doing them. Joel Spolskey sums it up nicely when says “Would you hire a magician without asking them to show you some magic tricks?” in his superb Smart and gets things done… book. The ideal way you should do it is get them to do a simple task in front of everyone and then give them a bigger task to do where the candidates gets some time to finish it by themselves. The first simple task is so that you can see quickly in a granular way if that person’s work style and thinking fits with the rest of the team. It also lets you check the confidence level and the ability to take in stress while actually doing a typical task. At Kaz we sometime ask the candidate to solve simple programming problem like sorting an array of numbers by writing it out on a whiteboard. Great way to see how she is thinking about it, how focused she can be with the stress of people staring at her work, how she handles the stress of writing the code without the help of an IDE which would help her with the syntax of the code, etc. The longer task is more to test a normal situation and see what the end result is both in terms of time it took and the quality of this relatively stress free task. If you are from the software world, Joel’s book or his blog is a must read in this space.
#6 point of creating at least one stress situation is all about testing the candidate for their ability to handle stress. Most interviews tend to be a very congenial affair, which is expected – we meet people we don’t know at all in business settings. So people stay nice and reserved. But most jobs are not like that, you absolutely need to know how this polite and nice guy will react when he is under stress. That is why you have to ensure that your interview team creates a stress test of some kind. Without your instruction or plan that just won’t happen. An easy way we do this at Kaz is by having one of us be the bad guy and try opposing everything that the candidate is saying – intentionally being wrong in some cases to see if and how the candidate counters this. This tactics only works well if you do this after breaking the ice a bit, so that the candidate feels comfortable voicing their concerns. In the software world this is relatively easy as you can say something that is obviously technically wrong and see how the candidate responds to that.
#7 is the take home task which lead to the possibility of seeing, if the stress of the onsite interview and the time constraints are taken off, how the candidate performs. In some sense this mimics a typical situation for the candidate after she has joined the company and have become more relaxed as she becomes familiar with the work and the teammates. This also tests a bit of how remote work might work out with this person.
#8 is to ensure that everyone agrees on the fit. Decisions on fit is always difficult, and it’s easy to be biased. I, for example, always like someone who can think of quick ways of fixing things in a programming problem. Great trait for sure for a startup trying to get their first prototype up but not a good fit when you are building a software that needs to be very stable. As a person it’s very hard for me to change my tests for fit and not be biased. This is why having multiple interviewers helps address that issue. And putting a rule that everyone needs to agree about a candidate for a hire ensures that a dominating bias doesn’t dominate hiring decisions. But when I say multiple how many do I mean? We’ve settled for a maximum of three. Keeping the number odd helps us from getting ties. But there are some interesting research work available in this front. For example in a study to find how many reviewers it took to achieve good decisions on candidates it was found that with a group of three the chances of making a wrong decision falls to just 6%. So that number of interviewers doesn’t have to be too big.
#9 is also about avoiding bias. References in a resume are pretty much guaranteed to tell positive things about a candidate. Listening to that feedback before the actual interview skews your view of the candidate and prevents you from independently making an assessment. So if you do want to check references (we rarely do), check after you’ve found the candidate to be a good fit and you are just checking to find if there are anything that you might have missed.
#10 is a bit controversial, but makes sense if you think about how much time and energy you’ll save by choosing a candidate early. The goal of the hiring process is finding the fit. If you find a fit it’s usually good enough. Yes there is always a chance that there might be someone “fitter” in your list but most of the times the benefits of choosing the current fit offsets the risk of losing out on a talent you haven’t interviewed yet. Obviously for this to work your test for fit needs to be good, but if you followed all the others in this list you should be there!
Once you have found the person you want to hire you have to make him an offer he can’t refuse. But what is that offer supposed to be? Having a fair reward structure is core to keeping people happy and content – the cardinal goal of a hearty company. People are not solely money driven, so happy people doesn’t necessarily mean the most paid people. Money obviously matters but it is only part of the fairness equation. People need to feel that they getting paid fairly for the value they add to the company but they also need to feel that their pay is consistent with others around them. Having a consistent pay scale that you stick to no matter what is much more important than being the highest payer in the block. I would argue that being branded the highest payer is actually detrimental to the concept of the hearty company because you then highlight money as core value and also attract the wrong set of people.
#1 and #2 are about the concept that a hearty company should not highlight money. Money should always feel like it’s a side benefit of following your passion. Conversations about your company should not lead to the fact that you are the top payer or that your benefits packages are the best. Don’t get me wrong here, you should definitely try to be the top payer – that is your insurance for hiring and retaining the top talents – but you never advertise it as such. You should absolutely make sure that you never mention money internal conversations. People should never feel like that the only reason they are with you is that you pay well. The reason for this is simple, money is single dimensional. It’s a number and anyone new in the block can increase that number and take away your spot. If that number is your only advantage, if that is what your people feel is the only reason to be with you then you will always lose. Aside for this simple business logic, there is something about the single dimensionality of money that destroys the feeling of belonging in a group. It reduces the bonds that hold a team together and reduces the feeling of passion people bring in. It is one thing that destroys the feeling of a hearty company the quickest. In the context of hiring, when you offer someone a job she should feel that she is getting the chance to become a part of a family where she can feel safe and add value. Part of that feeling will come from the offer you place in front of her but part of it should come from your existing reputation as an organization, from stories she has heard about your company and from the experience she herself has gone through during the interviewing process.
#3 and #4 is the most important action you can take to create a feeling of fairness. Fact of life: people will know the salaries the company pays whether you keep it a secret or not. If you have structured scale where people are paid by the value they add then it all feels fair. Having a scale also means that there is no fun in a discussion of salaries since it pretty obvious. The trick is to make sure you put people in the right spot in the scale. The key to putting people on the right spot is to assess, fairly, what value they add and make sure that the person is in spot in the scale where others in that same spot adds similar value. This is very hard. Try to make this value calculation as objective as you can. This is where you need to come up with your methods. In the software world it’s relatively easy, if the hiring process is good then people coming in would have the same kind of skill for a given number of years of experience. So you can, almost, place them purely on the number of years of experience. This probably works for most industries. However, remember there are more dimensions to the value a person adds than just her number of years of experience. Some people are just plain and simple geniuses in their abilities, the value they bring cannot be just a function of years of experience. In multiple studies over the years it’s proven that “there are order-of-magnitude differences among programmers" (Great read in this area for the software world - Code complete 2), here’s quote the original study from the 60s [Sackman, Erikson, and Grant (1968)]
“Impressive clothing, posture or even sometimes perfume can bias our decisions. An audio interview reduces the chances of this bias during the initial phases of filtering candidates.”
Another not so easy to pin down value is the emotional quotient of people. Some people are just great at bringing a group together, they are good communicators or good people to inspire the team to go through hard times. These are very tangible values that needs to be factored into your calculations. When you find people with exceptional qualities, you put them at a higher point on your scale to reward them for the value they bring in. You are still sticking to your scale, but your calculation for the value is just multidimensional. It’s easy to get things wrong here, and create a feeling of unfairness in this space. A common situation is where similarly experienced resources are suddenly in different points of the scale which creates dissatisfaction. You need to do two things to address this, a) you make sure that only exceptionally gifted resources are moved up the scale and not just a bump up to make the offer better for someone, b) make everyone aware, in whatever way it feels right, that this person is exceptionally gifted and so that everyone knows about the possible bump in the salary. Not easy, but doable. There is one way to avoid this problem completely: only hire exceptional people, then you can stick to the scale religiously on some single dimension!
#5 may not feel right for a lot of people. We are used to “bonuses”, “cash incentives” even little plaques and prizes for good work. But my own experience and a lot of research in this space shows that such performance tied rewards are actually detrimental to the quality of work. Rewards bring out the feeling of money that we try to avoid in a hearty company. Again – you are doing what you do because you love doing it and because you are helping your friends at work and your company in the process. This is what you were hired to do, and you were hired because you are good at this. So success is expected, good work is by default. Reward is also guaranteed by the salary you received. No external reward should dangle in front of you to make you work harder, you work hard because you want to. Putting special bonuses destroys this and makes the bonus the main objective. When there is no bonus it starts to feel less important. These external rewards are also demeaning to the people as it starts to treat them as children whom you can bribe with toy here and there. There are also ample research data that supports this point. A great read for a summary of these research work is Punished by reward by Alfie Kohn.
“For nearly half a century, research has raised troubling questions about the practice of dangling rewards in front of people to get them to do what we want. It doesn’t matter whether the people in question are male or female, children or adults. It doesn’t matter whether the rewards are stickers, food, grades, or money. It doesn’t matter whether the goal is to get them to work harder, learn better, act nicely, or lose weight. What the studies keep telling us is that rewards, like punishments, tend not only to be ineffective — particularly over the long haul — but often to undermine the very thing we’re trying to promote.”
#6 is about not giving the feeling to the candidate that you are trying to give her a bad deal. Offering the best offer you can afford (and with a scale in place that’s easy) right away sets the tone of a resources involvement with your company. They feel that they are being valued, and there is no feeling of distrust where you trying to con them into a lower salary. At the end of the day the little that you might have saved in giving a lower salary you would lose a hundred times over by the loss of trust that you create. You will pay a compound interest on that loss of trust over the full length of the time that resource is with you – in lost enthusiasm for work, in feelings of not being safe and most importantly in the distrust in your words and vision. Every resource should feel like you are doing the best you can within the business economics you are restricted in.
#7 is again about avoiding money driven individuals I hinted about in #1 and #2. I bring up the point again because after the initial offer you will have an early test of how money driven this person is. If the only matrix the person is interested is money then it should be an easy decision on your part to not go forward with the hiring. With the action of #6 you already don’t have an option to change the salary – the only option you have is to re-evaluate the spot in the scale. You can always check if you have missed any experience or some exceptional skills of the resource during your calculations. But also test how money driven that person is during this phase. Remember that a money driven person will always be on the lookout for another opening out there offering even more money. A hearty company can never be built with this mindset.
#8 is about making sure that the investment in time and energy you made in choosing candidates do not all go waste when you fail to hire someone. Always keep the options open to hire that person somewhere down the line. Stay connected. Put them in your mailing list. Drip market them with stories about your company – about how good you are doing or what great things you are making. Passionate people will always be interested to re-consider – maybe not right away but at point in the future. And when they do reconsider you save a lot by bypassing most of the hiring process. Some of the best employees at Kaz are people we couldn’t entice the first time round but came back to us later. One of them seven years after the first offer!
Further Reading
Blog: Joel on Software https://www.joelonsoftware.com/
Joel Spolsky’s writing in this blog has inspired me to do a lot of experiments at Kaz. Many of my greatest hits come from here. But many of his ideas failed badly too. Whatever the case it’s are a must read if you are in the software world. And some of his ideas work for pretty much any domains. Really good read, sadly he doesn’t write anymore on the blog.
Smart and Gets Things Done: Joel Spolsky's Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent - Joel Spolsky
Book version of his blog on topics specifically about hiring. Perfect thing to have when you want to quickly check some ideas.
Influence: Science and Practice - Robert Cialdini
A classic in the psychology of persuasion where the author comes up with a list of common persuasion techniques based on extensive research work in this interesting area. A good read on it’s own, but superb also to build up your skills for convincing people to follow you - must skill in this business of setting up an organization!
Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction - Steve McConnell
A wonderful classic for writing good software. It has some timeless sections on software team dynamics. Here’s a section that relates to how years of experience doesn’t tell you anything in the software engineering talent world:
“They studied professional programmers with an average of 7 years' experience and found that the ratio of initial coding time between the best and worst programmers was about 20 to 1; the ratio of debugging times over 25 to 1; of program size 5 to 1; and of program execution speed about 10 to 1. They found no relationship between a programmer's amount of experience and code quality or productivity.
Detailed examination of Sackman, Erickson, and Grant's findings shows some flaws in their methodology... However, even after accounting for the flaws, their data still shows more than a 10-fold difference between the best programmers and the worst.
In years since the original study, the general finding that "There are order-of-magnitude differences among programmers" has been confirmed by many other studies of professional programmers (Curtis 1981, Mills 1983, DeMarco and Lister 1985, Curtis et al. 1986, Card 1987, Boehm and Papaccio 1988, Valett and McGarry 1989, Boehm et al 2000)”
Punished by Reward - Alfie Kohn
Must read for those who think that dangling a bonus or little plaque is the only way to get people to be more productive and effective. At the very least this post on his blog is a great read: Bonus effect
