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If you hire someone that knows the work but just needs experience you will find yourself working with someone who is engaged and enthusiastic. If you hire the latter you will spend all of your time holding their hand.
Just remember, a junior is someone who has little work experience, NOT someone who isn't qualified. If you hire someone that knows the work but just needs experience you will find yourself working with someone who is engaged and enthusiastic. If you hire the latter you will spend all of your time holding their hand.
Don't underestimate how much work a junior causes so it's a valid risk. Most importantly, hire for someone you like on personal level and could go on for a drink. One of my past managers said i shouldn't have to be "friends" with any of my reports and only look for their output qualities. I disagree with this. Having a good connection with your teammates will make your life as a manager so much easier and if you can…
There are many reasons for this, but at least consider this: when team will grow, you will not be able to be friends with everyone, and those not included will feel that they are treated differently.
Then the trust will start to erode, because the only way to be included is to be "friends" with you - it will create all sorts of things in the working environment you don't want.
Working with friends is awesome, but only when they are on your level. Having friends as your reports is completely different beast.
* ensure that the person can acknowledge mistakes and handles criticism/feedback in a positive manner. obviously that needs to be communicated in a fair and responsible manner * do you want to have a beer/coffee/social interaction with the person outside of work? does not mean you will but you will need to build a relationship with the person * make sure you know what you are expecting from the hire, write that down,…
Unfiltered and unanalyzed, this is a bad metric because it essentially brings out the lowest-level mental evaluation of whether the person fits your tribe or not. It’s easily subtly biased against women, introverts, other ethnicities, etc. — not because you hate them but because your lizard-brain doesn’t automatically associate them with comfort.
Instead think about whether you’d want to hang out with the person, and then try to intellectually disregard that evaluation completely.
My main advice is to listen to your gut instinct. Things that mildly annoy or worry you in the interview will probably come to dominate your working relationship with them. Don't assume you can fix someone's flaws after they join. Get other people to give their gut instinct too, and everyone has a veto. When a new hire doesn't work out, it's extremely expensive and stressful for you, the person themselves, and the whole team to manage the situation, so it's better not to hire in the first place.
This means you'll need to be patient. On average, I've needed to interview 30 people to make 1 strong hire. A few extra months looking for the right person will deliver far more long-run productivity. However, treat every candidate with dignity - get back to them promptly with helpful feedback.
The best hires I've made have come through personal connections, and niche job boards. Most recruitment consultants are working merely for short-term commission, and don't care about your or the candidate's long term interests.
Don't underestimate how much work a junior causes so it's a valid risk. Most importantly, hire for someone you like on personal level and could go on for a drink. One of my past managers said i shouldn't have to be "friends" with any of my reports and only look for their output qualities. I disagree with this. Having a good connection with your teammates will make your life as a manager so much easier and if you can…
> One of my past managers said i shouldn't have to be "friends" with any of my reports and only look for their output qualities. There are many reasons for this, but at least consider this: when team will grow, you will not be able to be friends with everyone, and those not included will feel that they are treated differently. Then the trust will start to erode, because the only way to be included is to be "friends"…
You can be chummy all you want with the people you are hiring for, but the relation will never be as equals and you have to be cognizant of that.
A couple of years ago, I worked at a small company where the management asked me to Interview someone for a Junior role. They were a recent graduate. They did not do that well in the technical interview. Failed to answer some very basic questions, even when given the option to google the answers.
So my review for the candidate was: If hired, do not expect any useful (read: big feature) contribution from them for at least 2 months or so. Expect at least a couple of major screw ups in the first month or so. It would have been safer for us to hire the guy with 2-3 years of experience for that junior role at a slightly higher cost.
The management hired them anyway. The first few screw ups did happen. They messed up the master branch with some broken commits. (Not sure why we did not have master branch protection rules back then). They did not know certain basic things and needed a bit more hand holding by various team members. We had to make them rewrite their bad code on every other pull request.
But very quickly, the new hire became a very useful part of the company. I was so glad to be wrong about my interview. They were happy to test out and automate a lot of the manual tasks. That would have costed us a lot of "senior developer time". The product needed to work on windows, linux, mac, mobile devices etc.. So a lot of things needed to be tested. They created so much documentation and examples for our product, that we ended up finding many bugs in our own code. They fixed a lot of those minor bugs too and came up with new features and implemented them. Honestly, the product got most of the polishing because of them.
I am not too sure what exactly I learned about interviewing juniors from this. But I can tell you, In all of the small companies I worked, there were a lot of badly defined tasks that needed to get done. Juniors can grow themselves AND the company by fixing a lot of those things. I think it is more about "What work do we have that the candidate can / will get done?" As opposed to "Are they a good candidate for us?".
My background is in engineering, but I found myself responsible for hiring people outside of my expertise for roles like marketing, sales, finance, and operations.
The process:
1) Define the role. What do you need this person to do day in and day out?
Write the exhaustive list of tasks and the exhaustive list of behaviors.
Task: Write code that does X.
Behavior: Write maintainable code I can understand.
2) Stack rank the tasks and behaviors. What is the number one most important thing? Decide on a cut-off of must-haves, step-ups, and nice-to-haves.
Must haves: you’re not talking to a candidate unless they’ve shown they’ve done it.
Step-ups: a candidate is good to move on if you think the candidate can reasonably achieve this in 6-12 months.
Nice-to-haves: between two equal candidates, you’re going with the one who can do these things.
3) Level the role. Given what you need this role to achieve, is this a staff, senior, junior, etc? Hopefully this is straightforward. Sometimes this can be between levels and that’s ok. You should decide/work with HR on comp here too.
4) Build your interview flow. Who in your org or team will screen for must-haves and step-ups, run your technical assessment, run your cultural assessment, and run your structured interview for leadership behaviors? Assign responsibilities, come up with questions, and bucket those into each interview section.
5) Decide on your rubric. After each interview, what do you want to find out? Make sure each interviewer knows the questions they need to answer and send to you after each interview.
That should be most of it. I’d be curious to hear everyone’s feedback on this.
PS: My biggest piece of advice is to not settle. If you go with a mediocre candidate to wrap up early or to save money, you’re going to miss out on special people who may have changed the trajectory of your team.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Just don't hire a junior because you are afraid of hiring someone senior as your first hire. I'd go so far as to say don't hire a junior person as your first hire. Someone senior can help you with hiring in general and hiring good junior candidates in particular.
In my experience, there are juniors who are on the verge of becoming senior... and juniors who will forever be juniors, sadly. (Even with lots of support.) Any tips for distinguishing future abilities?
* ensure that the person can acknowledge mistakes and handles criticism/feedback in a positive manner. obviously that needs to be communicated in a fair and responsible manner * do you want to have a beer/coffee/social interaction with the person outside of work? does not mean you will but you will need to build a relationship with the person * make sure you know what you are expecting from the hire, write that down,…
> “do you want to have a beer/coffee/social interaction with the person outside of work” Unfiltered and unanalyzed, this is a bad metric because it essentially brings out the lowest-level mental evaluation of whether the person fits your tribe or not. It’s easily subtly biased against women, introverts, other ethnicities, etc. — not because you hate them but because your lizard-brain doesn’t automatically associate t…
You see this happen a lot when (say) poor management look too much at cost or box-ticking over team morale and competence.
"Can they do the job?" and "can we get on with them?" are both important questions for a healthy team, but yes, it is important that those questions are asked in an open-minded spirit.