
Want A Great Team? Focus On Talent, Not Hiring - pitdesi
http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/08/talent-not-hiring/
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prophetjohn
First of all, the distinction in the title kind of seems like nonsense. You
should focus on hiring talent. If you forget about talent, you might end up
with crappy engineers. If you forget about hiring, you may not end up with any
engineers.

More importantly, the author's goals are pretty unrealistic as a strategy to
be applied wholesale to all companies hiring engineering talent, or even just
startups hiring engineering talent.

From my understanding, the author posits that when seeking an engineer, you
need to find someone that 1) is good enough to start (read: co-found) a
company with you; 2) knock the socks off the company in 90 days (read: in 3
months, you need to be talented enough to contribute in a way that
significantly changes or improves the company); and 3) someone who is
"destined" to succeed in big ways (i.e. start a new company that's changing
the industry).

The sum of all this seems to be that the author is suggesting that the way to
build a great team is to find and only hire those engineers that are in the
top 1% or 0.5% of the field. I'm sure that's a fantastic way to build a team,
but it's not at all realistic, especially as a wholesale strategy. These
people are hard to find; there are only so many of them. A startup is probably
lucky if they can find one. It's pretty unreasonable to expect any company to
build a team of exclusively these kind of engineers.

It's a nice suggestion, but until we figure out how to come up with these
amazing engineers, it doesn't solve anyone's problem of building a great team.

~~~
rpwilcox
Exactly. Thank you, TechCrunch, for (amongst other things) making the talent
crunch _worse_ :

"TechCrunch says I need to hire rockstar programmers who can grasp the domain
model stupidly quickly then make room-blowing strides with in 90 days, in
addition to actively thinking about doing their own startup" - Some PHB after
they read this.

Good luck with that...

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aodin
The author has the right idea with the first item. Time, trust, and
communication are essentials in hiring.

But flying this under the banner of "talent" is bordering on link-bait. Look
at all the points he makes about hiring a "talented" individual:

* "...we’re asking whether you have the mettle to be part of an elite team."

* "A new hire won’t come up with something mind blowing if the team doesn’t bring the new hire up to speed quickly."

* "I don’t necessarily expect a new hire to do something amazing while he or she works with us."

* "A new hire won’t do something amazing, now or in the future, if the organization he or she works for doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain."

None of this is about talent. It's about a supportive ecosystem and cohesive
team.

"Talent" is just a label that HR applies to people they think will succeed in
an organization, and an after-the-fact definition when an individual has found
success in his or her role. And it's been my experience that those two groups
are far from congruent.

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sudonim
The author was Chief Product Officer of Color Labs. Case in point with his
last gig... a great team is nothing without a product that people can
understand.

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moocow01
I find this article completely laughable because the advice seems to be look
to hire someone who has all the abilities and drive to start their own company
and will do something mind blowing for your company. Well guess what? These
candidates already are starting their own company and aren't going to be
attracted by your .25% or even 5% equity. This is like the high school version
of rejecting people to go to the prom with and then when the prom comes, low
and behold you have nobody to go with - in other words, if you follow this
rubric you're probably not going to end up hiring anyone.

How about this for advice instead... Find someone who can fill and execute on
a specific need for your business in a cost effective way.

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WhatsHisName
This article was well written but deceptively pointless.

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rkon
The title is just a meaningless game of semantics, and the article doesn't
contain a single shred of useful information that wouldn't qualify as common
sense. Trust, communication, personality... are these really things anyone
needs to be told to look for in job candidates? If so, the tech industry (and
humanity, in general) is in pretty dismal shape.

And how does it help to ask ambiguous things like _"In four to six years, will
you be doing something amazing?"_ That's just asinine, not to mention lazy.
It's the interviewer's job to glean that information from answers to more
thoughtful, deliberate questions.

