Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses
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Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses
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Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses
#2>Instead of “how can we find the smartest people?” think about “how can we find people who will make our team stronger?”
I would have thought that was obvious? Why would you hire someone unless you had a need for their talents?
I guess I'm probably thinking small-business. At the biggest companies, they probably just hire and hope to fit them in because hiring for exact needs doesn't really scale.
Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses
#3Did you see the movie MoneyBall?
That's the point.
Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses
#4>Instead of “how can we find the smartest people?” think about “how can we find people who will make our team stronger?” I would have thought that was obvious? Why would you hire someone unless you had a need for their talents? I guess I'm probably thinking small-business. At the biggest companies, they probably just hire and hope to fit them in because hiring for exact needs doesn't really scale.
My experience is this obvious perspective vacates with any level of moral maze. The hiring processes kind of require it --> getting headcount approval requires defining a role and arguing how it will lead to better outcomes and then finding/interviewing candidates takes months of time. If your priorities shift in that time...well now you have to shoehorn whatever candidates you get into the role definition you gave before even though you know at that moment they'll be working on something different.
And then priorities shift again before they start. Leaving you not knowing what they'll be working on, but also certain you'll need extra hands on something sooner rather than later...
AND SO: "give me a smart generalist that specialized in these 8 technologies that make up the entirety of our product" becomes the only viable hire.
Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses
#5Too complicated. Tell weaker performers they're top talent and let their impostor syndrome do the rest.
Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses
#6If you want a competitive advantage and having a better team than the competition helps with that, then you are looking for a team that is better than the competition's. This is what you hire for. If the competition is very good, you need to perform better - that does not mean every member of your team needs to be better than every member of the competition's team, except when it has to. For example, take professional tennis players: they need top trainers, top physicians and top managers to be #1. Hiring someone that is not experienced just because they can ask the right questions... will not work. Even asking the right questions require very good knowledge, otherwise they will ask random questions. You don't want to fly in a plane built by someone without experience, but asking smart questions.
Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses
#7Two personal counterexamples, whether right or wrong:
Management consulting
- you want to be perceived as hiring the best
- project work that is not known in advance, you need very versatile people
- looking for demonstrated desire to jump through the hoops and do the marginal work that makes you the "top"
Software Engineering
- some overlap with the reasons above
- adds to the moat: if they're happy working for FAANG et al, competitors are priced out of getting the best
- the economics of many technologies are now defined by whether they can return enough to pay people competitively vs big tech. E.g. there are lots of cool deep learning applications that are tougher to try when you need to pay 300k / year for someone really good to run with them
- I'm interested in the sibling post referencing moneyball, this would be very cool to see applied to software engineers
Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses
#8Knowing to hire for weakness instead of "top talent" implies a level of reflection almost no medium+ sized company actually has. Most companies don't need top talent, and the talent they have isn't anywhere close to the top.
Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses
#9Exactly. Some traits are always good, some always bad and yet others depend on context.
For example I currently work with a team with a lot of very hard working technical people but not enough concern for questions like "what's valuable for us to work on?". So I need to hire people who will ask those questions.
On the other hand, if my team was full of big picture pontificators, I'd be looking for someone who's shut up and code for a change.
Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses
#10Exactly. Some traits are always good, some always bad and yet others depend on context. For example I currently work with a team with a lot of very hard working technical people but not enough concern for questions like "what's valuable for us to work on?". So I need to hire people who will ask those questions. On the other hand, if my team was full of big picture pontificators, I'd be looking for someone who's shut…
This is also great personal advice. Every month or two look around and see what is missing on your team. Do you need more shared vision? More code? Does your team lack expertise in some area? Do you need more support and acknowledgement from upper management? Are bug reports piling up?
Whatever you need, work on that.