How to hire low experience, high potential people

We're still in the introduction, and already flirting with ageism. Much of HR is about actively avoiding lawsuits, not going out of your way to invite them.

> I really like questions with maximalist qualifiers like "tell me about your best X.” If it's not good, you know that their best isn't good enough.

I really like interviewers who have a nuanced and humble understanding of the world.

> 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.

Unless the candidate had a pretty enviable childhood, or they're already well-coached in milking a carefully-crafted origin story for college application and such... then I suspect it's very likely that this line of questioning is either going to get you a halfhearted "masking" response (which might not be gritty enough for a particular interviewer), or activate a lot of associations that have little to do with the job, and quite possibly could be traumatic. An interviewer shouldn't be a downer, nor be stumbling into psychological manipulation.

> This is one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in the past – I found someone young, hungry, and wildly talented. However, they were also deeply insecure about their choices and prone to bouts of indecision and paralysis that crippled them.

This can happen. But there's also an obligation to mentor, especially young people. Also, not all the rough spots are necessarily in an individual (it's not unusual for something in the org to be the cause of problems).

> If you’re worried about negativity in the interview, know that it will only get worse over time.

I'm wondering how accurate these confident universal assertions by the writer are. (For example, maybe they're coming out negative because an interviewer just dredged up some painful childhood experiences, see above. Or the cultist impression they're getting from their interviewer is souring them on a company that they were excited to join.)

I have a few 'wise truths' of my own, so I shouldn't be too quick to judge. Reading this has reminded me that sometimes we need to explain when we say suspiciously tidy universals like that.

> Point out things that could be better about your company that could be in scope for their role — great people are excited by the challenge, not by everything being perfect.

This is related to something I like to do in interviews, which is to set a cultural tone of honesty, and to be honest about the situation and about helping find a mutual match.

The writer seems to be using similar appearances tactically, to elicit more information about the interviewee, to evaluate them against interviewer's beliefs about right and wrong response.

> High EQ + Persuasion. People who have a clear-headed view of a situation, and the soft skills/influence chops to bend the environment to their will, are especially valuable. It’s an underrated skill. What to look for: “Game recognize game” – it’s all intuition. It’s the feeling that you’re engaged and enjoying the conversation with the person, but you can see the gears moving in their heads as they read the room.

Of course the writer can't be expected to read the room of the entire Web, to know what "game recognize game" isn't going to go over well as a workplace culture with everyone.

As a person who scores high on "intuitive", people sometimes exercise what the writer is talking about in a way that I personally find to be a turn-off. I try to get them to meet me in a genuine and honest mode, and most do. Not for us to riff together on some corporate game mode, when we're both aware that we both know what we're doing (there are moments, but that's not the top mode to select for). Nor do I want them to try to manipulate/persuade me when they think that we both don't know what the other is doing (sigh, not a good sign).

> What to ask: You know it when you see it.

Out of context, this line at the end of the article isn't entirely bad advice for an experienced and thoughtful person.

The most famous example that I can think of is Henry Kissinger, who fled Nazi Germany with his family, at age 15, to escape persecution as a Jew. He claimed, to his dying day, that he was not heavily impacted by the experience. Maybe he wasn't. But I wonder if any of the genocides laid at his feet were in part caused by his refusal to accept any impact his teenage experiences might have had on him.

Demanding that people tell an interesting/engaging story about why they have C/PTSD, just to get a job, totally tracks for the late-stage-capitalism narrative though.

In my experience, this includes high level writing skills all the way down to sentence structure, but not including the ability to write in a formal or "educated" register. Basically, it shouldn't take a lot of effort to read what they write, on a macro level (what is this about? what are the points being made, and how are they related?) and the micro level (what does this sentence say?)

This doesn't correlate nearly as directly with formal education as you would think. Some people with a degree and an impressive vocabulary write text that looks like a courtroom transcript of their train of thought, and some people with very little formal education write nicely structured text that is easy to read, even if their dialect of English isn't what you'd find in the New Yorker. It's less about formal education than it is about their ability to organize your thoughts and their ability to see their work from another person's perspective, which are important skills for many aspects of programming, including writing the code itself.

The downside of this criterion is that if you don't read someone's native language, you can't judge them by it, so if you're looking at multiple candidates for the same job, it's problematic to give one candidate credit if you can't judge all of the candidates. On the other hand, writing well in the language the company works in is almost always a valuable skill in its own right, so it's rare that you would want to completely disregard a weakness in this area. You just have to be aware that an excellent engineer might struggle a bit in a language that isn't native for them.