Aka interviewing for culture fit.
How to hire low experience, high potential people
11–20 of 433 posts
Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't think I'd be comfortable sharing this much personal information with a stranger on a job interview. Then lie and tell a good story.
Good point! Seems like the writer has accidentally optimized his interview for narcissists, psychopaths and pathological liers who excel at manipulation, instead of true high-potential young people :)
Six of one, half dozen of the other.
Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people
#13> “Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. Go back to their childhood! I learn a lot about their grit and commitment to excellence from their basketball obsession or maybe their experience caring for a dying parent. I don't think I'd be comfortable sharing th…
Yeah fuck that. Maybe those topics can come up after we’ve been working together for a while and have built up a strong rapport and trust (not a given). This feels totally inappropriate for an interview.
Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people
#14the common denominator is the author
makes all else moot
in hiring at best you can avoid the bad, but knowing good is always a toss up especially for high autonomy roles
i’ve seen good process for cookie cutter roles, but thinkers are idiosyncratic
outside of, “avoid dishonest people” there’s no general rule
and the dishonest people can look very honest
Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people
#15> Most smart people are actually terrible at having the drive/follow through to take things to completion. They’ll usually want to give up at the first sign of failure or slowness. You can also hire that really "smart" person from a large co to a startup and watch them be extremely successful in a low-friction environment for crossing the finish line.
Startups have just as much friction. The only difference is that the friction is more external than internal.
Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people
#16So you're looking for a creative, self-starting, committed, open, persuasive team-player that can go their own way and work with the team to achieve big goals. Got it. /s
P.S. The /s is sarcasm.
Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people
#17> “Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. Go back to their childhood! I learn a lot about their grit and commitment to excellence from their basketball obsession or maybe their experience caring for a dying parent. I don't think I'd be comfortable sharing th…
>it sounds more like a psychological evaluation
Ultimately if you're talking about who you work well with, how you deal with frustration, adversity and etc, that's sorta what you're talking about.
I am not a big fan of some of the questions, but ultimately when we think of how humans work together, well or not, it's often a social thing.
Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people
#18> “Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. Go back to their childhood! I learn a lot about their grit and commitment to excellence from their basketball obsession or maybe their experience caring for a dying parent. I don't think I'd be comfortable sharing th…
It depends on the role you're hiring for. I suspect a lot of comments in this thread, echoing your sentiment, will be written from the perspective of sharp-end-of-the-stick engineers for whom the idea of working on ambiguous organizational problems is an abstract concept, far from their day to day. Not saying that's you per se, but this is HN after all. This crowd loves for things to be clear-cut, especially when they absolutely can't be.
For roles that require discontinuous improvement to company process or culture, it's necessary to get a glimpse into how someone thinks, and the elements that went into building their worldview. You need to know how they will react under pressure to an extent that I think is largely irrelevant for a lot of engineering roles.
In other words, the difference between a psychological evaluation of an individual and that individual's potential to do this sort of work becomes very muddy and indistinct. You want to have a picture of their psychology, because the problems you're hiring them for are often psychological in nature.
This is not a popular opinion among engineering types; we like things arrayed in black and white, passing tests and failing tests. But that's naive.
Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people
#19> “Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. Go back to their childhood! I learn a lot about their grit and commitment to excellence from their basketball obsession or maybe their experience caring for a dying parent. I don't think I'd be comfortable sharing th…
> maybe their experience caring for a dying parent.
Yeah, you would have to claw this out of me with a hammer. There's absolutely no way I would be comfortable sharing that level of intimacy with a stranger.
Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good point! Seems like the writer has accidentally optimized his interview for narcissists, psychopaths and pathological liers who excel at manipulation, instead of true high-potential young people :)
Six of one, half dozen of the other.
Sure, if what you want is a toxic team.