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Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

benjiweber.co.uk

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Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

#21

Post by briefcomment »

mpoteat wrote: post #19
briefcomment wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They literally hire the people with the best grades and test scores from the top universities. Idk how much better you can get than that.

It's well considered by a lot of people in the industry that a prospective's grades and even which school they went to aren't a good predictor of skill.

Unless you have them actually work with you for a month, they're certainly the best predicators available for new grads with no portfolios right?

FWIW, the most effective colleagues I've worked with all scored really high on standardized tests. They're a great predictor imo

Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

#22

Post by erosenbe0 »

slyall wrote: post #16
AdrianB1 wrote: post #6

If 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 professiona…

Except that business is not like sports. There is no "level playing field" that matches teams 1 for 1 against their counterparts. In many cases most parts of the company just have to be "good enough". If you have a great marketing team and 90% of the market already then you don't need a world beating tech team. Even when you are competing against equal and similar companies there are areas there are points of differe…

There can be luck, too. Billy Joe BigAccount decides to give your company a massive contract because his daughter's diaper wasn't too dirty that morning.

Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

#23

Post by codenesium »

briefcomment wrote: post #21
mpoteat wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's well considered by a lot of people in the industry that a prospective's grades and even which school they went to aren't a good predictor of skill.

Unless you have them actually work with you for a month, they're certainly the best predicators available for new grads with no portfolios right? FWIW, the most effective colleagues I've worked with all scored really high on standardized tests. They're a great predictor imo

The best programmers I know didn't go to college. It's been my experience that degrees and standardized test don't tell you jack about how well someone will do a job.

Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

#24

Post by briefcomment »

codenesium wrote: post #23
briefcomment wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you have them actually work with you for a month, they're certainly the best predicators available for new grads with no portfolios right? FWIW, the most effective colleagues I've worked with all scored really high on standardized tests. They're a great predictor imo

The best programmers I know didn't go to college. It's been my experience that degrees and standardized test don't tell you jack about how well someone will do a job.

I bet if you gave them a standardized test (even any IQ test), they would crush it

Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

#26

Post by vjeux »

For what it’s worth, at Facebook the general hiring process is in two steps. There’s a centralized hire/no hire that most people are aware of and then a second phase where team selection happens. This is where all the “hire for weakness” steps that the author mention happen. Teams are looking at this pool of people for speciality, levels... that they need and where the matchmaking happens.

There are also a lot of smaller but specialized longstanding loops like front-end, AI... and one off “reqs” for special roles that teams need.

The world of hiring is very fascinating :)

Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

#27

Post by yowlingcat »

briefcomment wrote: post #18
zabzonk wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you want to be perceived as hiring the best Only idiots perceive that consultancies hire "the best" - the best are off doing other things. > project work that is not known in advance, you need very versatile people No, you need a load of dimwits you can throw at a project and make some apparent effect.

They literally hire the people with the best grades and test scores from the top universities. Idk how much better you can get than that.

You can get a lot better than that, and you actually reference it in a later comment -- you see how well they perform on an actual task. It's true that high standardized test scores and IQ test scores often come along with high performers, but it's at best a necessary but not sufficient condition. That's like saying the only thing you need to make great wine is good grapes. Plenty of awful wine has been made from excellent grapes.

Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

#28

Post by villasv »

wccrawford wrote: post #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.

Your mindset is modeled after a simple selection process. Big companies often have pipelines for selection processes. HR does screening, leader does interview, manager approves.

Each step of the pipeline, the responsible has to optimize for what the team needs. In practice, each one is evaluated by what the layer above thinks. HR optimizes for CVs the leader likes, leader optimizes for profiles the manager likes.

Specially at large corporations, managers are removed from the daily needs and don’t have the context to evaluate if the person is the optimal fit for their future tasks, so they concern themselves with evaluating “raw talent” (obviously in a very subjective and biased way). Same thing happens with HR doing the screening.

So “talent” is defining both at the beginning and the end of the pipeline, it’s no surprise the end result is an inconsistent hiring pipeline.

Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

#29

Post by Kinrany »

andrew_v4 wrote: post #7

Two 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 FAAN…

> project work that is not known in advance, you need very versatile people

Don't you need the team to be versatile instead of individuals?

Re: Don’t hire top talent; hire for weaknesses

#30

Post by johnsmith4739 »

Amazes me how little data-driven recruiting is. Just as the author puts it, a good hire is for culture ad, and that means being explicitly aware of what's missing. Tough stuff to really look inside and see what's missing.

Most hires I see are either out of desperation or because the recruiter had a good chemistry with the candidate. A 1h interview means 0,3% of the time I will work with that person in one year. Talk about a small sample size.

(shameless plug): I built this for figuring out the candidate personality: https://freyasense.com/recruiting/

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