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How to hire an idiot

nukemanbill.blogspot.com

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Re: How to hire an idiot

#21

Post by freejack »

The lesson here is to never rely on someone else's hiring process to do your screening. Big Corps VP can easily become your douchebag if you aren't on the ball.

This is a great startup story - I think the original poster got off easy. For the price of some pens, a dinner and a whole bunch of wasted time (and perhaps a small hit on credibility) the truth was found. I've seen situations much, much worse.

This is exactly why hiring is described as the most important thing a manager/executive/founder can do.

Re: How to hire an idiot

#22

Post by ericflo »

What I'm taking away from this is that it really is important to check up on the background and specific accomplishments of new hires, regardless of prior accolade or title.

Re: How to hire an idiot

#24

Post by wdrwilson »

The hiring process and possibly placing too much trust in a new employee can be dangerous without the proper due diligence. However I think there is something else that has to do with technical people running their businesses that is worth mentioning.

Being a technical person in sales can be bloody scary, I run a software company and at the beginning I was scared to death about both sales and marketing. So much so that I would avoid it, and only do it when absolutely necessary. Which lead to basically working on whatever came along. Not ideal, and I was basically working for myself, with no real growth.

While working at a co-working space I met a fellow entrepreneur who had a sales and marketing company mainly focused on lead generation and online marketing. I hired his company to help with new messaging for our company. However this engagement quickly turned into sales coaching 101: how to build a sales funnel, effective proposal writing, understanding buying signals, targeting ideal customers, the whole works.

The whole time we worked through this process I was learning and understanding, and becoming less and less scared. One of the books that he recommended to me was 'Customer Centric Selling', it's a good read and I think is ideally suited to technical folks finding themselves in sales roles. It talks about sales as a process, and not a "who you know" connections mystical black box. you know.. Like the VP of the 100 million dollar company wanted to do. Connections always help, but the process is there to make sure that the optimism that the sales people will undoubtedly assign to each deal can be measured and verified. I find you don't get into these situations where a sales person feeds you a loaded forecast with nothing to back it up.

As the founder you need to know what works for your business, and don't hire a sales person hoping they will have magical powers and be instantly able to sell your product/service. Learn and create the process yourself, then hire a sales person and have them execute and refine your process. You know your business best. Others can help, but at the end of the day it's on you!

Re: How to hire an idiot

#25

Post by baddox »

ww520 wrote: post #7
iand wrote: post #4

Number one rule of hiring: take up references

Does reference checking really work? People pick references that can put them in the best light. How would one phrase questions to get the true answers from references?

It's still difficult to get good references if you're not competent. Sure, some people might get friends to flat out lie and say they're a previous employer and give a glowing review. But how often will that really happen? More likely, people will pick real references that will give a good review, but you can still get good information from that reference (e.g. their responsibilities at the previous job, why they left, etc.).

Re: How to hire an idiot

#26

Post by tptacek »

lukev wrote: post #12

So he was a highschool dropout. How do you not notice something like that on a resume? College degrees are always listed on resumes, and while they aren't that important in most cases, it should at least be brought up as an interview conversation point if it's missing entirely (and from there, launch into a discussion of how a person gained their skills, which would have completely unveiled this guy).

How would you notice that on a resume? High school drop-outs don't write "high school drop-out" on their resume. In fact, many people, including many of the best people, don't put "education" on their resume at all.

Re: How to hire an idiot

#28

Post by apaprocki »

_3u10 wrote: post #5

The more important lesson to learn is that if you're confident, likable, and remember people's names you can be VP of a $100 million dollar company. Now if you're competent as well, imagine how far you could go...

Reminds me of this guy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravi_Desai

At a company in SF we interviewed him and I can only imagine what would have happened if he was hired. Luckily everyone who talked to him thought he was nuts. Cramer talks about him in his book.

Re: How to hire an idiot

#29

Post by Periodic »

MaxGabriel wrote: post #9

I think you can still do this: "-- Hire people smarter than myself, who get things done! -- Trust them to do their job, let them do their job and give them enough resources to do it! -- Pay them WELL and offer great benefits! Work at home! Sure, why not? -- Give people second chances! Don't throw out resumes because of lack of buzzwords! Or disjointed writing! Or lack of education! It's all about Smart People who Get…

The problem is that he took "VP of a $100M company" to be stuff having been done and other people thinking the ex-VP was smart. He never verified it though. He took a secondary indicator of ability to make a sale (VP status) and used it to infer a bunch of primary indicators (stuff done, intelligence, actual ability to close a sale) without actually checking any of that.
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