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Any time you want to know if you succeeded at some task, then you have to compare your performance against your goals. In this case, you hired two people at a c
by db48x 8y ago
Any time you want to know if you succeeded at some task, then you have to compare your performance against your goals. In this case, you hired two people at a cost of $X. If your goal was to hire two people then you succeeded. If your goal was to hire four people, then maybe you failed. Since you can just repeat the exercise N times until you hire two more people, then it just depends on whether $N*X fits in your budget.
As for the questions themselves, I'd say that they are too finely graduated on the low end, and not finely graduated enough on the high end. This means that you ended up in a situation where you can't tell if one of your candidates is better than the other(s), while you can tell a lot about the relative skill levels of the people you didn't want to hire. You want more discrimination at the high end so that you know which of your candidates you would like to hire, and which you must hire.
The other thing that you could do is just be willing to hire junior engineers who need training, alongside the senior engineers who can train them. Anyone who got question 8 correct, for instance, but not the rest, could have been a good choice for this role. They would likely have learned a lot over the next year or two, and then you'd have a lot of capable engineers.
- shoo 8y agoAnother perspective would be to try to model the costs of the hiring process, and how the overall cost per hire might change if you could adjust the survival rates for each stage of the funnel (or other parameters, such as what the budget is for the role, or flexible working conditions, or how long you're willing to train people, or whatever) e.g. i imagine the largest cost is going to be onboarding the people that you've decided to hire, not the stages in the preceeding application/scheduleinterview/interview/techinterview/offer steps, so however you fiddle with the funnel it's probably not going to make the process 2x as cost efficient, but there is some risk that the funnel is perhaps selecting for the wrong people .
- yeldarb 8y agoAgree, the post-hire costs seem easier to quantify. One of the things I struggle with is what you mentioned above -- what's the opportunity cost of losing people who have a higher ceiling / learning velocity but less immediately applicable experience. I don't know how to measure that before hiring someone though. Is there a good way to assess that?
- db48x 8y agoThat's a different budget category though. I was only referring to the cost of the time used in the interview process. If you've budgeted a month to hire four people and only got two, then you're way behind. But I agree that this may be a small thing compared to the six months you might be expecting a new hire to take before they've become fully productive.