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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

#181

Post by lumost »

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 sounds like a "Like me" bias in hiring. Your looking for someone with a similar "high potential" upbringing as what the interviewer had.

You could likely get a similar interview outcome with less interviewer bias by filtering resumes based on school/major/GPA + (alternate activity) + a battery of behavioral/tech questions. It's desirable by many employers to have a recipe to identify candidates who are less desirable on paper, but equivalent in role.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#182

Post by swayvil »

Speaking as an AS slacker with more gaps than not. Ho ho ho.

Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife...

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#183

Post by klyrs »

grdgyredb wrote: post #151
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can't clean the world, but my kitchen is my responsibility.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#184

Post by delecti »

beisner wrote: post #131
mywittyname wrote: post #56

> Disagree and commit: I hate that this is such a common thought process. This is something that makes sense for soldiers in the military. But outside of this context (being a low-information cog in a gigantic machine), it's terrible. If you can't convince domain experts that the plan is sound, then maybe it's a bad plan. Honestly, disagree and commit goes against my... > Theory for excellence.

> I hate that this is such a common thought process. In most teams, not everyone is on the same page: - There are people with varying levels of experience, some may not currently have enough background to fully understand all the aspects that a plan addresses. - Many/most people have the tendency to let their various biases creep into team-level decision-making. For instance, if someone had a bad experience on a prev…

Agreed. You eventually need to take some course of action, so if you can't get everyone on exactly the same page, someone won't get their way. Those people can either accept that their approach isn't being taken, and thus work towards the approach which has been decided upon, or refuse to cooperate, hurting the team in the process.

The only real weakness with "disagree and commit" is if you have a deeply unreasonable leader, and then "disagree and commit" is the least of your problems.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#188

Post by jprete »

smeeth wrote: post #75
CharlieDigital wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a 4-quardrant way of thinking about this that's similar. - Y-axis is "drive" - X-axis is "aptitude" - low drive + low aptitude: never hire - low drive + high aptitude: hire for targeted use cases where you need expertise - high drive + low aptitude: hire, train, and foster aptitude growth - high drive + high aptitude: hire on the spot There's an indirect way of testing for this which is to test for curiosity a…

I like this, but I do think it misses the social stuff. Just a few neurotic/unethical people can completely ruin a team and make all the best people quit. I find this to be extra true on diverse teams (all types of diversity).

As nineplay@ remarked elsewhere, "there's a nauseating bias here against people who've had horrific childhoods".

Unethical is one thing, neuroticism should not be a disqualifier from decent employment.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#189

Post by Aurornis »

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?

"Cool" isn't a good word to use, but it is important to filter for people who can get along with others.

Some candidates can't make it through an interview without being condescending to someone, making snide remarks, being arrogant, trying to start arguments about trivial things, or other negative behaviors. If they're doing this during the interview, you're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. It's going to be 100X worse when you have to deal with that person 5 days a week.

Other candidates behave well during interviews but have a history of causing social problems at other companies. It takes some work to uncover these (and, importantly, validate their veracity). Some of the most toxic people I ever worked with were very charming in interviews. They swung from company to company, leaving a trail of unhappy coworkers behind them. They could only get hired into new companies where nobody knew any of their past coworkers, because a simple reference check would reveal how difficult they were to work with.

Filtering this behavior out before someone joins the team is very important. Hiring a single socially toxic or subversive person into a team is like dropping a bomb on a healthy team dynamic. You may lose multiple good employees before you figure out what's going on and put together a case for firing the bad apple.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#190

Post by the_mar »

hnfong wrote: post #177
the_mar wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a ton of stories of a "cared for his dying aunt..." variety, 99% of the time when asked about personal stuff in the interview I am forced to lie, because otherwise the interviewer is coming out of that deeply scarred. So my perspective is that anyone who tells you a "cared for his dying aunt..." story is full of shit and definitely is playing you.

I agree probing into the candidate's childhood is probably a bad idea as an interview topic. However, for sake of argument, given that your story is true, shouldn't it also be evidence that those _not_ talking about "caring for dying aunt" is lying too? I mean, you told a story that didn't involve caring for a dying aunt, and that was a lie. We actually don't have evidence (either within your story, or in general I s…

Yes, I have a whole palatable origin story prepared, that lines up with what people want to hear and isn't traumatizing. So it is entirely useless as a signal.

Not my fault that my life experiences aren't made for a casual conversation starter. Which is why I say this line of questioning isn't going to produce good outcomes.

And of course we don't have evidence that people make up dying aunt stories necessarily. But if anyone tells me this is the kind of experience that made them realize what's important is at the very least embellishing the truth.

When I was caring for my dying father, I learned how to function on autopilot, perpetually sleep deprived, in an emotional fog. I was also writing my master thesis and struggling to pay rent with shitty student jobs. Did it make me "realize what is truly important", hell no, but it did make me be ok with cutting corners, doing the bare minimum at work/school and striving for mediocrity because I didn't have physical or mental capacity for anything else. This isn't exactly the kind of thing employers want to hear, so I'd never bring this story up unless specifically asked. And then I'll tell you how it taught me about "what is truly important in life" which is disingenuous

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