

I hired twice the people in half the time by changing my decision-making style - halfshark
https://medium.com/p/d3b5d9216145

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sp332
Link shorteners are highly discouraged on HN. This link goes to
[http://bit.ly/19IUGXU?cc=79a16693e4e904c00490c6eb9a2d621e](http://bit.ly/19IUGXU?cc=79a16693e4e904c00490c6eb9a2d621e)
(and you can see the stats
[https://bitly.com/19IUGXU+](https://bitly.com/19IUGXU+) ) which finally
redirects to the actual article
[https://medium.com/p/d3b5d9216145](https://medium.com/p/d3b5d9216145)

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thatthatis
The term for this style of short circuit decision making is "satisficing.".
There's a wide body of economic psychology that suggests that satisficing
selection algorithms (as opposed to optimizing selection algorithms) lead to
greater happiness.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing)

~~~
wudf
I remember learning about that in micro econ. Maybe I did learn something in
business school after all.

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HelloMcFly
I typically recommend this in my line of work, especially for occupations that
are non-abundant in the relevant labor markets. Hiring can be expensive if
only for the time spent looking for that _perfect_ candidate which ultimately
appears only marginally more qualified, and vacant positions carry a cost
themselves.

Add on to that the fact that most employers use selection techniques with
relatively low validities (e.g., interviews, particularly unstructured) and
that validity degrades over time anyway (i.e., performance between someone
predicted as "good" vs. "mediocre" is much more noticeable early in the
employment relationship than it is six months or a year later).

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JoeAltmaier
You can do a lot better than this, with only an incremental cost. Look for an
adequate fit; pass on them. Then accept the next fit that is better than that
first fit.

Its a whole standard deviation better result, at probably less than double the
cost. Works for lots of things: choosing shoes, a wife or husband, entrée on a
menu etc.

~~~
sp332
Are you talking about this problem?
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem)
The math is a little different: You can increase your chances of finding the
single best applicant in a pool just by discarding the first 36.8% that you
come across, then picking the next one that is better than those.

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sssantosha
I know Vungle is a pretty young company, but how long have the people you
hired this way generally stayed with the company? Really interested in how
short hiring cycles translate to culture fit and employee longevity.

~~~
j_s
So is the author of the article; I hope she writes a follow-up whenever it
becomes clear how her strategy has worked out!

~~~
halfshark
Thanks, guys! We're still early in the process, but I'm more than happy to do
an update next year! Let me know if I can give you any more information.

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hnriot
This sounds like a really bad idea.You'll end up with a bunch of mediocre
people and a few that carry all the weight. Soft skills are great in
marketing, but in development, give me competent developers over ppt writers
any day.

~~~
greenyoda
That's not the impression I got from reading the article. It says:

" _Instead of interviewing everyone on the planet and trying to optimize, I
set a goal to hire the first person who met all of my criteria._ "

If one of her criteria is "must be a competent developer", then she's going to
get competent developers.

The kind of criteria she can easily compromise on are:

\- Some kind of mythical perfect "cultural fit" (e.g., must like to have beer
with co-workers after work and eat lunch with them every day).

\- An exact match on salary requirements (instead of finding someone who will
work for $100K or below, pay them their asking salary of $110K; time is money,
and if you hire someone today, you'll get to market faster).

\- Must know every single open source library you're using (if they know 5 out
of 8, they can learn the other three faster than it would take you to find the
"perfect candidate").

\- Attended a fancy college and got a 4.0 GPA (if someone has a few years of
work experience, that stuff doesn't matter much anymore).

