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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

#401

Post by erhserhdfd »

Aurornis wrote: post #189
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?

"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…

" 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." --> Any tips on how to effectively conduct reference checks? In my experience, candidates will only provide references from folks that they know will give glowing review, so you end up with generic positive feedback that ends up not being informative.

Would love to hear any strategies others have found successful.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#402

Post by wglb »

I used a very similar approach when building the security team while I was CSO at Relativity. I wrangled as much as I could with HR to do it this way. It boiled down to an initial phone call where I described the company, the job, and our process and asked if there were any questions. I did not ask the candidate any questions about their background.

If they expressed an interest in going further, we would share with them a work product sample tailored to the position. This included hiring a manager of compliance and a project manager.

The work sample test had a rigid metric and gave us a go/no-go answer.

This approach was very successful.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#403

Post by geraldhh »

spaniard89277 wrote: post #62
duxup wrote: post #4

I like that this isn't your typical skills demo. I changed careers at age 40+, learned to code, now years later enjoying it. It just took someone who thought I could grow. Interestingly I was hired along side some capable, albeit green, college grads. The difference in terms of understanding how a business works, speaking to customers, asking questions / follow through to get down to the problem we're solving was eno…

I'm 36 And also trying to get my foot in. It's very hard, wish I could find someone who gives me an opportunity. I've been interviewed but it's always about the skillset you bring to the table. Can I throw you against a codebase and be productive quickly? Do you already have experience with this obscure library? I want to build now a website using React + Function Calling + Puppeteer, IDK what else to do to impress p…

> It seems the market is just too saturated, despite the frequent news about we need millions of people who can do X! It seems like a way to get cheap and disposable labor.

seems a good bet to stay clear of industrialized work environments if one doesn't want to be cheap and disposable labor.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#404

Post by duped »

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 you probably come from money already, are surrounded by people who come from money and are mostly going to talk to candidates who come from money.

The tech world is filled with wealthy people not wanting to believe that their wealth was a determining factor in their success. Having the social and financial stability to found a company and get money to hire people is the kind of thing that takes a degree of wealth and tends to attract people with wealth and repel people without.

I don't think people consciously choose to hire the rich kid, but the pool of people to choose from will be filled with rich kids.

> 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

If their child was able to go to an expensive prestigious school across the country and then an expensive graduate school instead of needing to work, have a larger network of friends and colleagues from those experiences, and can pay for them to have better healthcare and a nicer apartment in San Francisco because you're not able to pay enough then yes. It's more likely you're going to pick them and they'll say yes to you.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#405

Post by chefandy »

Xelbair wrote: post #342
chefandy wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That probably makes perfect sense for you, and reflects most technical people's perspective, but it depends on the job. When I've interviewed developers and other technical people when I was in that business, I wanted to gauge if they'd be pleasant to work with, and vaguely "who they are," but that's about it. In a dev interview, I'd be suspicious of someone digging into what made me tick, if for no reason other than…

There's a difference into trying to understand what makes everyone tick, and going into deep personal details. It might make sense from employer perspective, but why i should put myself at risk? It is similar to prisoners dilemma.

Design studios also tend to be a lot smaller and their reputation is more transparent than tech companies. If I was applying for a job to be a designer at IBM, I'd be more wary, but you're also much less likely to be doing the really deep-digging conceptual stuff in those roles. But when it comes to the really deep conceptual work, the chance of joining a low-productivity team or even just not jibing with them is too great. That stuff is like the equivalent of troubleshooting skills in dev. The "getting to know you" conversation would be like giving a developer some leetcode questions without actually seeing if they're good at solving problems. Like I said though, it's easier when you're talking about a business with like 15 people that you probably at least have a friend of a friend that's worked there. I guess it boils down to having the benefit of community. Also, these jobs tend not to be as sticky as dev jobs and people move between them a lot, so it's easy for you to slide on to the next place.

I also have to say that the shittiest, most toxic and manipulative job I've ever had didn't have a particularly robust hiring practice. It was my first white collar tech job so I was already used to shitty manipulative employers in lower-level support jobs and didn't catch it. They were perfectly content to figure out how to exploit people after they were hired.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#406

Post by eszed »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #392
eszed wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Off the top of my head: - HR professionals deal with a ton of shit, including assaults. - First responders, obviously. - Message board moderators? - Customer service of any kind. (The Karen memes are irritating, and really, really mean, but I swear I recognize every one those interactions from my years in those kinds of jobs.) - I was trauma-dumped plenty of times during my teaching career, as well as been loudly - e…

All of those things are made far worse if you’re actively having traumatic flashbacks, and do not benefit at all from having a traumatized childhood. The actual best things for the above is appropriate training and crisis intervention strategies.

Exactly. Which is the rationale for asking about past trauma in an interview. If the interviewee locks up in a traumatic flashback then they're clearly not prepared to do the job.

Again: I'm not defending the practice. It's a really gross metric, and a really gross (in the other sense) method. I just haven't seen this thread demonstrate much understanding of what's actually going on.

You're 100% correct about crisis intervention training. I had a few sessions - of dubious worth - while I was a teacher. I worked in a group home for troubled kids for a bit, and that one included learning physical restraints - which I did end up needing. My best mentor, however, was a grizzled old waitress who took a drag on a Camel (cigarette), shrugged, and said "you just gotta let them have their say". She was a wizard at de-escalation.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#407

Post by StreetChief »

duped wrote: post #404
throw18376 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 you probably come from money already, are surrounded by people who come from money and are mostly going to talk to candidates who come from money. The tech world is filled with wealthy people not wanting to believe that their wealth was a determining factor in their success. Having the social and financial stability to found a company and get money to hire people is the kind of thing that t…

This is spot on stuff.

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#408

Post by pvaldes »

powerset wrote: post #63
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…

How do you test for curiosity?

> How do you test for curiosity?

uh? tell me more

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#409

Post by dzikimarian »

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?

You put bias next to stereotype like it's the same and taint it with bad connotations. I might have team where talkative person can be good fit. Other teams may consider such trait distracting.

You're choosing companion for 8h a day. Nothing wrong with checking culture fit (because that's basically what it is).

Re: How to hire low experience, high potential people

#410

Post by Shocka1 »

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…

Breath of fresh air to see this at the top. The focus on leetcode always confused me, and this is coming from someone who took all the fancy graduate level algo courses.
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