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How to hire low experience, high potential people

worktopia.substack.com

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Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#151

Post by grdgyredb »

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #108
smeeth wrote: post #41

People's intuitions around hiring aren't Bayesian enough. I think a good process reduces down to something like: - Are they smart? (understands quickly + communicates effectively) - Are they cool? (won't put poison in the keurig + pleasant to be around) - Are they high energy? (initiative + action bias) - Do they have the experience needed to be successful in the role? Those are pretty strong priors for success. If y…

How do you measure "are they cool" without just directly transforming all of your biases and stereotypes about the candidate into a numeric score?

As long as you aren’t illegally discriminating, it’s more important that you avoid hiring shitty people than it is that you eliminate all bias.

You can’t single-handedly solve the systemic problem of unequal access to opportunity.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#152

Post by rectang »

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #98
kapp_in_life wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think I'd be fine weeding out people who can't read a social situation and decide to traumadump to their future coworkers.

So the interviewee is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Between the need to have a job to survive, and the need to appease some self-important middle manager who took it upon them to perform a psych eval, with zero credentials, while controlling the future of the candidates, and their ability to put food on the table. Kindly, make your self as visible as possible so that I know to avoid you.

Exactly. I felt intense revulsion reading GP’s comment. Collaborating in a team where there’s zero concern for people’s life circumstances is a no-go. It’s impossible to maintain work-life balance when life can’t even be acknowledged.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#153

Post by benreesman »

nineplay wrote: post #57
bheadmaster wrote: post #7

> “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…

There's a nauseating bias here against people who've had horrific childhoods. "Let me tell you about the years of physical/emotional/sexual abuse I've suffered though." That's just not going to happen - and if it did happen the interviewer is probably not going to come away with "What a brave person to overcome all of that!" but "What a damaged person, I don't need them around". Well done, you've weeded out people wh…

My youth was by no means exceptionally traumatic, but it was no fucking fun, and cumulatively amounted in me being a “from the wrong side of the tracks” figure in software, which was eminently doable when I was getting started and is still doable, but one works awfully fucking hard for the privilege as the ambient level of bad behavior well-concealed, cronyism, insularity, and utterly obliviousness about the public’s feelings hits 88mph.

I apologize to the author in advance if this assumption is off base, but the biopic at the beginning reads like the kind of life no one from my neighborhood had.

What I will say to the author is: be a lot more careful with the power over people’s lives afforded by your current privileged status, whether you earned it or not.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#154

Post by randomdata »

throw18376 wrote: post #126
randomdata wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> adding more boxes tends to index towards box-checkers who grew up wealthy. Yeah, but that's the point. Those who come from wealth bring connections. Connections are what make or break a business. A mediocre worker with rich parents is far more beneficial to the business than a standout worker that came from the slums.

i think that in the United States, this is simply not the case up until the true super-rich. the vast majority of rich people are not well-connected enough to drive any business your way. if you have a tech startup do you really care that you hired the son or daughter of a car dealership magnate from the other side of the country? in the USA it's possible and in fact more common to become a very wealthy without becom…

> if you have a tech startup do you really care that you hired the son or daughter of a car dealership magnate from the other side of the country?

Of course! That's an incredible resource. Even if they don't specifically drive business your way, having the person's ear is something that can be leveraged to great effect. You don't exactly become a car dealership magnate without knowing a thing or two about business and they can teach your startup a lot. A magnate is more likely to chum with investors who might be interested in helping your business. The list goes on and on. Unfortunately, at least statistically, the poor parents will never be able to offer the same.

American individualism may be the American identity, but individualism doesn't get you far in business. America is not unique like you are trying to suggest.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#155

Post by toast0 »

siva7 wrote: post #46
bheadmaster wrote: post #7

> “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…

I'd quit such an interview. Those questions are going over the boundaries of a strictly professional relationship. The thing with low-experience, high-potentials is that they may be bit more insecure than seniors and therefore might think that such questions are normal which they are not.

> The thing with low-experience, high-potentials is that they may be bit more insecure than seniors and therefore might think that such questions are normal which they are not.

It's not about being insecure, it's that they are likely to lack the experience and knowledge about if those questions are normal.

If you get those questions when you're going around on your first job interviews, and didn't get coaching on what should and shouldn't be asked/answered, you wouldn't know they were weird.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#156

Post by geonic »

bheadmaster wrote: post #7

> “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…

This is highly inappropriate for a job interview at least in my country. You can’t ask these type of personal questions. Who would feel comfortable sharing this with a complete stranger anyway?

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#157

Post by chazu »

nineplay wrote: post #57
bheadmaster wrote: post #7

> “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…

There's a nauseating bias here against people who've had horrific childhoods. "Let me tell you about the years of physical/emotional/sexual abuse I've suffered though." That's just not going to happen - and if it did happen the interviewer is probably not going to come away with "What a brave person to overcome all of that!" but "What a damaged person, I don't need them around". Well done, you've weeded out people wh…

Absolutely - anyone who focuses this much on personal life during an interview is almost assuredly clueless as to how to manage people.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#158

Post by PaulHoule »

sesm wrote: post #77
PaulHoule wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I think some people in business have a pathological need for things to be poorly defined. They dread a visit to the ontologist even more than they do to the orthodontist. I think some people just don't feel like things are in control unless they have a large arbitrary structure that confounds everybody else and lets them do whatever they hell they want. (Meanwhile, Steven Covey would say you should be proac…

Some people thrive by “catching fish in muddy waters”. The real motives of people very often differ from declared ones, but at a workplace it’s usually either getting promotion/pay rise or stealing from company in some way (kickbacks, bribes, benefits for their side business, etc).

Yeah, the best thing those people have going for them is that they get old and die and turn to dust so they don't have to live with the effect that they have on other people. It's one reason why the ancients invented the idea of the afterlife, to put some fear into those people.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#159

Post by PaulHoule »

chefandy wrote: post #71
PaulHoule wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I think some people in business have a pathological need for things to be poorly defined. They dread a visit to the ontologist even more than they do to the orthodontist. I think some people just don't feel like things are in control unless they have a large arbitrary structure that confounds everybody else and lets them do whatever they hell they want. (Meanwhile, Steven Covey would say you should be proac…

Conversely, some in the engineering mindset have a pathological need to nail down ambiguous things to a definition because it fits their style of reasoning. Nobody thinks it's easier to work with poorly-defined things-- even with a well-defined overall goal, when the specific goals and risks in achieving it are a bit ambiguous, you're pretty likely to get it wrong if you try to stuff the problem into a neat little bo…

Any real revolution in living conditions (like being able to support 8 billion people on chemical fertilizers) always involved finding order in situations. Everything else is about as effective as pushing the deck chairs around on the Titanic.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#160

Post by tinycombinator »

elevatedastalt wrote: post #138

I never thought I'd say this, but... I'd rather grind Leetcode instead of being psychoanalyzed by a "Hip hop enthusiast masquerading as a San Francisco technologist".

The comparison may be superficial, but this article really reminds me of the times when I wrote essays for college admissions (not in a good way).
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