
Ask HN: How to disconnect emotions from hiring decisions? - smattiso
I am starting to hire a few positions for my company. Up until now I have always hired contract workers and because of this my relationship with &quot;employees&quot; has always been &quot;You deliver X for $&quot;.<p>Now I am trying to hire for a variety of positions, some on the more professional side, some more entry level. Right now I am having a hard time rejecting people based purely on their resumes because: A.) We&#x27;ve all had to go through the hiring gauntlet so I want to give people their best chance. B.) How can you distill a person to just what a few words on a pdf say?<p>Obviously I am going to pick the best candidate for the job as that is best for everybody but simultaneously don&#x27;t want to reject people out of hand, nor do I want to interview people that won&#x27;t succeed and make people feel bad about themselves unnecessarily.<p>Thoughts?
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muzani
I don't see why you should. If there's anything I've learned, emotions are
probably the best indicator when hiring. A lot of bad decisions were made by
trusting the paper and trying to give the person a chance because of it.

I don't try to turn it off. Instead I just write empathic rejection emails
when necessary. I always reject with a reason, sometimes it's inexperience,
sometimes it's a sloppy cover letter, sometimes there was just someone better.
It's a bit mean to say I rejected someone because of typos in their resume, so
a nicer way is to reject all resume screens with a link:
[https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/08/sorting-
resumes-2/](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/08/sorting-resumes-2/)

Interview as many people as you have the stamina for. Often the best people
are those who barely passed the bar, so a wider bar could help. But try to
keep the screening brief. Maybe a half hour chat and then rejection letter to
those who didn't make the cut that day.

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robjs
The most important thing for you to identify is what the key characteristics
of the person that you're trying to hire are -- can you teach them the
technology if they don't know it, but it's key that they're able to interact
with your customers in a helpful manner? Maybe it'd be OK to be a bit gruff if
they were able to handle all your DevOps tasks and take those off your plate.
Figure that out - and then bias for those characteristics.

Even then, you absolutely cannot distill how successful an employee someone
will be down to a single document, but equally, you can't interview everyone -
so there's some level of pragmatism that you have to exercise to be able
determine who to interview. My experience here is that the filter criteria
doesn't have to be the typical screening that a bunch of us probably are
frustrated by (e.g., "does the resumé mention Python? No. Route it to
/dev/null").

I've tried the following.

1\. I'll filter by folks that I think have demonstrated some interesting
commitment in their journey to where they are. For example, interesting side
projects along with their professional experience, or a non-traditional route
to their role (e.g., didn't attend college for the "expected" subject). My
experience here has been that these folks often have different insights that
have correlated to being easy to work with, and fruitful for the teams that
I've engaged with.

2\. I'll try and determine folks that are able to communicate in their resumé
some particular outcome that shows that they had a wider perspective than
their immediate role. This tended to me to show that the person was able to
think a bit wider than the task that was on their plate, which again has
correlated with good teammates to me.

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_ah
1\. Have a set criteria for what skills a successful candidate possesses.

2\. Have a set of pre-defined interview topics or resume rubrics designed to
discover and test for these skills.

3\. Ask everyone the same questions. Grade everyone the same way.

4\. Don't ask _" Is this candidate good?"_, but instead ask _" Is this
candidate better than the others, based on the scores from my defined
rubrics?"_

5\. If something feels "wrong", walk away. Sometimes your subconscious knows
things your conscious mind hasn't discovered yet.

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thdc
If you're getting emotional over resumes just wait until you get to
interviewing and you actually meet them!

I started my professional career recently, and when I was applying to jobs a
timely rejection was the second best outcome to me - I knew that avenue was
closed so I could focus efforts elsewhere.

You're just overestimating how badly people take rejections - especially when
all they've done is submit a resume so far.

