hiring good employees. iq tests, what else? - keiretsu
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palish
Okay, the conversation probably went in a wrong direction. Let's change pace:

1) Do you, personally, write code? If yes, that's a good thing.

2) You probably know that each employee is like a mini-founder. (If the number
of total employees is small, then they could really be a founder.) It doesn't
take a smart person to found a successful business, but rather hard work and
dedication. People can do really, really well on an IQ test and have no
dedication, or they can bomb the IQ test and have so much dedication that they
make up for it. Therefore, if the IQ test doesn't have any correlation to how
good an employee is, you shouldn't use it to gauge anything.

3) At the company I work at, we've put together a programming test. It's
difficult and it grills you hard. If you get a 60/160 we'll still consider you
(I got around 60% two years ago). The test is followed by every developer in
the company spending time with the interviewee, asking them questions. Then
the interviewee is asked to go to the white board and do a programming problem
that we give him verbally, with no use of an editor or compiler. How he can
react to a the stressful situation of being asked to solve a hard problem in
front of total strangers says loads about him. But possibly the most important
part is that at the end of the day, the decision for hire or no hire is made
from a gut instinct by all developers. That's just how humans work, and it
does work.

The programming test weeds out all non-hackers. We call each semi-promising
person in, sit them in a room for an hour and leave them with the test. At the
end of the hour we score them and if they do horribly, we send them on their
way with no hard feelings. It doesn't use up too much of our time, and finding
a great person is worth the effort.

You should read
<http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html> also.

Shawn

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NickDouglas
You could test them on their knowledge of Python.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP0sqRMzkwo>

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curio
the problem is that i know a lot of really smart people who don't have the
self-motivation to produce anything.

~~~
zemaj
Very true. I've always found productive people to be much more useful than
smart people.

~~~
ralph
That's not what he's saying. He said _self_ motivation. So if left to their
own devices they'd rather learn more than stick to one task and produce
something.

Smart, productive people are what you want when they are being motivated,
possibly by others, e.g. boss or peer pressure. I don't care how productive
they are if they're not smart and not working in a smart manner.

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far33d
Asking a few nearly trivial programming or other puzzles in the initial job
listing or in a first phone screen really helps for two reasons:

1) it discourages lazy people and resume spammers. Most people want to cut and
paste their resume and cover letter and be done. Someone solving your (even
simple) puzzle means they might actually be interested in what you are doing.

2) You make sure they aren't completely incompetent jokers. They pass the
trivial reject.

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Prrometheus
As a banker, I asked each entry-level candidate to tell me about something
that they did that was hard. Basically, I want to know how they will perform
when it's gut-check time. The real world will provide occasions where their
character will be tested.

One positive about this method is that I got to hear some interesting stories,
whether it was the kid that started his own commercial hookah bar in college
or the one that expelled a friend as a member of his college honor council. It
was easy to tell which candidates had the right stuff and which did not.

Intelligence is important, but the kid that was voted most likely to succeed
in my high school was not near the most intelligent. And for what it's worth,
I think the voting was accurate.

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gyro_robo
Employees? You want people who do as they're told and accept bureaucracy.

Essentially the opposite of a founder.

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chiefp
references are the key to hiring. not the "official" ones. Backdoor or
referrals are the best. <http://genotropic-orgs.blogspot.com/>

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keiretsu
planning to hire some people soon.

any recommendations on how to gauge if they are any good? I need some
statistically significant tests that can weed out those loafers. Know of any?

~~~
npk
No, they don't exist. First of all, your question has no objective test
function. Let's put aside that totally fundamental issue. In that case, you
would need a test that distinguishes out of a small group of people, and would
not have any statistical robustness.

Another way to look at this problem is, if such a test exists, why doesn't
everyone use it? The SAT, for example, is very well correlated with
intelligence. Most companies don't care about it.

The overarching question, "how do you weed out good people?" is a fundamental
challenge of running business. Generally, the advice is to hire people that
you _personally_ know are good. If that doesn't work, hire the good people
that other good people know, if that doesn't work, maybe you or your pitch is
not that good.

~~~
keiretsu
actually, i would look at SAT. Not as a major decision point, but just one
small factor in the entire hiring process. IQ test would take another small
factor. Personality another factor, Familiarity with the domain you are hiring
for another factor. Experience another factor. and so on. This way, even if
you don't score well for your SAT, your other factors may make up for it.

isn't this how Google now automate their hiring process (at least in the
initial stage to filter out the crap)?

Categorize their current best and worst employees based on these factors. Then
get the factors of the interviewees and run them on their bayesian classifier
and it will indicate whether the interviewee is likely to be a good or bad
employee.

~~~
abstractbill
I would think twice about working for anyone who gave me an IQ test. Not
because I think I'd do badly on it, but because of what it says about that
employer.

~~~
keiretsu
what does it say about the employer?

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run4yourlives
That they can't hire the right people.

Seriously, employers that are able to "feel" out the right people don't need
tests, they'll go with their gut instincts, just like smart business people.

Employers that give IQ tests usually lack this skill and have been burned
because of it. I wouldn't want to work at a place that I couldn't trust to
find high quality colleagues for me to build with.

(This from a person that naturally scores in the 130's in IQ tests)

~~~
keiretsu
hiring based on "feel" is like trading based on "feel". My back hurts. Damn,
short this stock. Oh god. I feel alive whenever i see this stock. Buy!

it's always good to base your hiring on something that is testable. Call me
crazy but hiring is a long-term continuous process. It's best to have a
program that's testable and verifiable, rather than simply be based on gut
feel.

~~~
run4yourlives
You aren't hiring robots. You're hiring people. If you want to be analytical
about it, you'll end up hiring the person that tells you what you want to hear
the best.

That's not usually the person you want.

