
Best Hiring Practices - followmylee
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/06/mba-mondays-best-hiring-practices.html
======
cletus
> A HR professional can identify the candidates who don't come close to
> meeting the requirements of the job and filter them out.

In my experience this is mostly not true. Most HR people don't know tech so
what the HR screen devolves into is cramming your CV with acronyms so you make
it pass the HR grep filter.

> You will want to interview a decent number of folks for every position.

If you're bringing in more than five people for onsite interviews then (IMHO)
you're doing it wrong. You're wasting your time and theirs and it's clear to
me that you don't know what you're looking for.

At least Fred advocates phone/video screens (of 15 minutes) although he
suggests 6-12 onsite candidates.

> Many employees don't know how to interview and you should teach them the
> basics ...

This is true but I would go further: most people shouldn't interview. It's
arguably a talent not a skill. At Google, it's viewed as every engineer's
responsibility to do interviews and I disagree with this. Many of the stories
of bad interview experiences can be attributed--at least in part--to people
who just don't have the interest or talent in interviewing.

Anecdote: in one quarter I once took 10 people to lunch as part of their
interview slate. In those lunches I just talked about the company, answered
their questions, etc but didn't get into any technical discussions.

Of those 10 I predicted 8 wouldn't get offers, 1 would and 1 I was borderline.
Actual results: 1 offer, 9 no offers putting me at 9-10 out of 10.

> If you connect to the candidate on LinkedIn, you can quickly figure out who
> you know that knows them.

What an incestuous world the NY/SF tech scene must be if this is true. Well it
might be true if you're a veteran VC. I can't see it being true for anyone
else.

Otherwise this is all straightforward good advice although it skips the most
important step: how to determine if someone is a good fit and competent but
that's a topic we'll probably argue about in perpetuity.

~~~
rdl
1) I could tolerate HR screening for _completely_ random people, who apply via
a web form or cold email. Of course, I don't think I have ever hired or seen
someone hired that way.

Anyone who comes in as a referral (from investors, employees, friends, etc.)
shouldn't be speaking to anyone in HR until after an offer letter is signed.
The only possible exception would be having HR handle travel arrangements for
on-site interview, but even that should probably be handled by whoever does
travel for the team in general (or the hiring manager if everyone normally
does it themselves).

HR involvement will basically add zero value AND screen against your most
competent 10% of candidates.

I'd probably walk out if an HR person talked to me, or someone tried to put HR
in as a gatekeeper. I have met a couple of minimally competent HR people ever,
and many more who were criminally incompetent.

2) 2-3 interviews with multiple people in each can work. It really depends on
the role. What I'd probably prefer is 2 real interviews with 1-3 people in
each, and then lunch where you get to meet a bunch more people casually (and
basically be sold on the company), and then after lunch, an interview with
founders (if they weren't in already). You can short circuit and send people
home after the morning meetings if they're horrible, and after lunch if
they're not-hire-now-but-maybe-in-the-future-or-may-have-competent-friends.

------
adrianhoward
_The first step in opening up a position for hiring is to define the position
you are looking for. Most companies call this a job specification (or spec)._

I'm still shocked at the number of employers who _don't_ create one before
they start looking for somebody. Especially those who don't think about how
the new hire will fit into the existing organisation.

For example, I've seen this pattern multiple times.

a) Lead Developer (let's call 'em Mary) gets massively overloaded. No time to
do the numerous things she's asked to do.

2) "We need another Mary" is as far as the job spec goes.

3) They find "Bob" who is, indeed, mostly another Mary. Bob gets pulled off
onto NewFunProject, since Mary is waist deep in keeping CoreCompanyProduct
running. Pattern repeats.

4) Mary rapidly gets rather annoyed that Bob gets to play with all the fun new
projects, and promptly finds herself a nice new job. Walking away with a
head's worth of CoreCompanyProduct that never got to Bob.

5) Bob gets massively overloaded. Goto 2.

Hiring is _not_ what you should do to fix a short term problem.

~~~
balloot
The fundamental problem in your example has nothing to do with hiring. It's
that Mary is working on something that she dislikes to the point that having
to continue on her project in the medium term will cause her to quit. It's
both the company and the employee's joint responsibility to ensure that this
isn't the case.

~~~
adrianhoward
I'd argue that it has _everything_ to do with poor hiring practices :-) I
should have made it clearer that at (a) you have a happy, but overloaded
employee.

By hiring somebody else, and by not thinking it through what that person
should do in the context of the current workforce, a happy employee becomes an
unhappy one.

Before they hired Bob - before they even start looking for a Bob - they should
have had a good idea what "Bob" would be doing, how that's going to fit in
with what Mary's doing now, and that everybody is happy with that.

Nobody went in with the idea that "Mary will get the dull stuff and Bob will
get the neat stuff" since that's obviously a dumb decision. But because nobody
had articulated what _exactly_ Bob should be doing, and how that may or may
interact with Mary's role, bad things happened.

If they'd thought about it, written a job spec, and talked to Mary some of
these issues would have come up. They would have probably figured out that "We
need another Mary" wasn't what they _actually_ needed. When a company is
growing "another Mary" is almost always the wrong thing to ask for - since as
the company grows roles change.

By looking to define the role they would have found out that Mary does Q, W,
X, Y, & Z. She's not very hot at Q since it's not a core skill, but she's
really passionate about X, Y and Z, and W needs to get done and she's happy to
do it. So maybe what the company needs is for Mary to focus on X, Y & Z, and
get somebody else who's good at Q and W... or two different people who are
good at Q and W.... or some other option.

Hiring is _exactly_ what makes this happen - and I've seen it more than once.

------
dgant
Wilson suggests contacting references not provided by the candidate. That can
be a major breach of privacy.

When people are looking for jobs -- particularly while employed elsewhere --
they are entitled to do so discreetly. If employer-directed reference checks
are a requirement, candidates should be made completely aware of that and be
given an opportunity to opt out. If that halts the hiring process, that's
fine. At least the applicant retains control of his or her privacy.

~~~
beagle3
> Wilson suggests contacting references not provided by the candidate. That
> can be a major breach of privacy.

He mentions it casually, so I don't know what exactly he meant.

I know that I did as he recommended -- but before I contacted a reference not
provided by the candidate, I asked them if it was ok to make that contact. In
most cases, the answer is "sure, go ahead", or "that's ok, I guess". When the
answer is "I rather you wouldn't", the story is often interesting and relevant
to your hiring decision.

~~~
jaylevitt
Conversely... I know a guy who worked with a well-known startup founder, but
he didn't list that founder as a reference, because he was sure he'd burned
his bridges. Just so happened that the hiring manager had the founder on
speed-dial. Later that night, the manager calls the founder, who says: "If I
were to start a new company right now, that's the guy I'd want with me."

You never know.

------
adrianhoward
_Many employees don't know how to interview and you should teach them the
basics as well as educate them on what you are looking to learn from their
interview_

If you're in the position of doing interviews for the first time, and don't
have anybody around to teach you the basics, I would _thoroughly_ recommend
getting a copy of Lou Adler's book "Hire With Your Head". It has some really
excellent advice on how to approach interviewing, and the hiring process in
general.

There's a brief article on Adler's site that covers accomplishment based
interviewing that you can find at
[http://www.adlerconcepts.com/resources/column/interviewing/u...](http://www.adlerconcepts.com/resources/column/interviewing/use_the_onequestion_interview.php).

Having a focus on accomplishment based questions - drilling down into a
candidates' experiences on real projects - is a hugely useful technique.
Talking about the work in detail helps you separate candidates that interview
well from those with real skills.

~~~
fredwilson
that is great advice. thanks!

------
Peroni
A lot of this post is eerily similar to one of my old blog posts:
[http://voltsteve.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/why-should-i-join-
yo...](http://voltsteve.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/why-should-i-join-your-start-
up.html)

I'm not claiming the author lifted any of the content but I am curious as to
whether or not he/she had read my post in the past?

~~~
krschultz
Wait, you don't know who the author is and you call yourself a tech recruiter?

Fred Wilson has invested in what, 100 tech companies? He has been writing MBA
Monday's posts for years. This post has multiple hundreds of comments on it.
There are probably hundreds of retweets and comments on Twitter about it (you
know, another company he invested in).

I'm pretty sure he didn't need your blog post to give advice on hiring.

~~~
bostonpete
Hey, it could happen. After all, Google stole my idea to make a self-driving
car.

------
tokenadult
From the submitted article: "The first step in opening up a position for
hiring is to define the position you are looking for. Most companies call this
a job specification (or spec)."

But then the article, which after all is titled, "Best Hiring Practices,"
doesn't go into detail about how to use that information to build a good
hiring procedure to screen in the best applicants for each job. There are many
discussions here on HN about company hiring procedures. From participants in
earlier discussions I have learned about many useful references on the
subject, which I have gathered here in a FAQ file. The review article by Frank
L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of Selection Models
in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of
Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 124, No. 2, 262-274

[http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...](http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf)

sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed
professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology
devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring
criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews
for job experience, checks for academic credentials, and so on. There is much
published study research on how job applicants perform after they are hired in
a wide variety of occupations.

The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable
secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work
reasonably well (but only about at the 0.5 level, standing alone). One is a
general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test, such as the Wonderlic
personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample test, where the applicant
does an actual task or group of tasks like what the applicant will do on the
job if hired. Each of these kinds of tests has about the same validity in
screening applicants for jobs, with the general cognitive ability test better
predicting success for applicants who will be trained into a new job. Neither
is perfect (both miss some good performers on the job, and select some bad
performers on the job), but both are better than any other single-factor
hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous research, across a wide
variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your company, it's a good
idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into all of your hiring
processes.

For legal reasons in the United States (the same legal reason does not apply
in other countries), it is difficult to give job applicants general mental
ability tests as a straight-up IQ test (as was commonplace in my parents'
generation) as a routine part of hiring procedures. The Griggs v. Duke Power,
401 U.S. 424 (1971) case in the United States Supreme Court

[http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=8655598674229196978&q=Griggs+Duke+Power&hl=en&as_sdt=2,24)

held that general intelligence tests used in hiring that could have a
"disparate impact" on applicants of some protected classes must "bear a
demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it
was used." In other words, a company that wants to use a test like the
Wonderlic, or like the SAT, or like the current WAIS or Stanford-Binet IQ
tests, in a hiring procedure had best conduct a specific validation study of
the test related to performance on the job in question. Some companies do the
validation study, and use IQ-like tests in hiring. Other companies use IQ-like
tests in hiring and hope that no one sues (which is not what I would advise
any company). Note that a brain-teaser-type test used in a hiring procedure
could be challenged as illegal if it can be shown to have disparate impact on
some job applicants. A company defending a brain-teaser test for hiring would
have to defend it by showing it is supported by a validation study
demonstrating that the test is related to successful performance on the job.
Such validation studies can be quite expensive. (Companies outside the United
States are regulated by different laws. One other big difference between the
United States and other countries is the relative ease with which workers may
be fired in the United States, allowing companies to correct hiring mistakes
by terminating the employment of the workers they hired mistakenly. The more
legal protections a worker has from being fired, the more careful companies
have to be about hiring in the first place.)

The social background to the legal environment in the United States is
explained in many books about hiring procedures

[http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-
GZkw6...](http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-
GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA271&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrlOV&sig=ctblj9SW2Dth7TceaFSNIdVMoEw#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false)

[http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-
GZkw6...](http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=SRv-
GZkw6TEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA95&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology&ots=iCXkgXrnMW&sig=LKLi-
deKtnP20VYZo9x0jfvqzLI#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology&f=false)

[http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWl...](http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=frfUB3GWlMYC&oi=fnd&pg=PA9&dq=Validity+and+Utility+of+Selection+Models+in+Personnel+Psychology+%22predictive+validity%22+Duke+Power&ots=5O9Hx_E1vY&sig=g-zERWztBWq3h4guEuv9VVkTh8I#v=onepage&q=Validity%20and%20Utility%20of%20Selection%20Models%20in%20Personnel%20Psychology%20%22predictive%20validity%22%20Duke%20Power&f=false)

Previous discussion on HN pointed out that the Schmidt & Hunter (1998) article
showed that multi-factor procedures work better than single-factor procedures,
a summary of that article we can find in the current professional literature,
in "Reasons for being selective when choosing personnel selection procedures"
(2010) by Cornelius J. König, Ute-Christine Klehe, Matthias Berchtold, and
Martin Kleinmann:

"Choosing personnel selection procedures could be so simple: Grab your copy of
Schmidt and Hunter (1998) and read their Table 1 (again). This should remind
you to use a general mental ability (GMA) test in combination with an
integrity test, a structured interview, a work sample test, and/or a
conscientiousness measure."

[http://geb.uni-
giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/prepri...](http://geb.uni-
giessen.de/geb/volltexte/2012/8532/pdf/preprint_j.1468_2389.2010.00485.x.pdf)

But the 2010 article notes, looking at actual practice of companies around the
world, "However, this idea does not seem to capture what is actually happening
in organizations, as practitioners worldwide often use procedures with low
predictive validity and regularly ignore procedures that are more valid (e.g.,
Di Milia, 2004; Lievens & De Paepe, 2004; Ryan, McFarland, Baron, & Page,
1999; Scholarios & Lockyer, 1999; Schuler, Hell, Trapmann, Schaar, & Boramir,
2007; Taylor, Keelty, & McDonnell, 2002). For example, the highly valid work
sample tests are hardly used in the US, and the potentially rather useless
procedure of graphology (Dean, 1992; Neter & Ben-Shakhar, 1989) is applied
somewhere between occasionally and often in France (Ryan et al., 1999). In
Germany, the use of GMA tests is reported to be low and to be decreasing
(i.e., only 30% of the companies surveyed by Schuler et al., 2007, now use
them)."

~~~
temphn
tokenadult, this might be your best post ever and shows that you are aware of
the literature on IQ, its predictive validity, and the legal difficulties
around using it explicitly (though implicitly everyone is looking for smart
people). Admit to being puzzled as to how this squares with the general thrust
of your comments on other topics, which seem to skew more nurturist than
naturist.

------
cldrope
How often is this guy going to keep posting his own articles on here? It seems
that almost as often as he WRITES articles they are posted here.

Protip: None are really very good.

