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You're right, and I too have run a startup and came to the same conclusion about contract-to-hire being the most reliable way to ensure employee quality. Unfor

You're right, and I too have run a startup and came to the same conclusion about contract-to-hire being the most reliable way to ensure employee quality. Unfortunately it's just not an option for most candidates (especially for more senior people in high CoL places like SV). The fundamental challenge of interviewing is that no matter what you focus on whether it's technical or social skills, an interview is not long enough to give a proper indication of how someone will perform day in and day out. As an interviewer the best thing you have are proxies such as work experience, and yes, squishy behavioral questions of dubious value—you still have to ask something. As an interviewee there is no way around learning the subtexts and getting good at answering them. In many ways it's a silly social dance, but when you get good at it you actually can learn a lot about companies as well, and improve your chances of getting hired at a place you'll really like.

im_down_w_otp 8y ago
You can get pretty far with precursor in-person (or video call in a pinch) personality profiling as a screening, some informal probing for motivational biases, a half-day or so of pairing w/ a couple different teammates on the problems they're actually working on, and including the candidate in a directed meeting. This assumes as a hiring manager you've done your work to fully understand the need you're hiring for, not just the skill set. That you know how this need fits into the composite model of the team and the company. And, that you've prepared and trained the team to be able to assess and give you the specific kinds of feedback you need to derive from tbeir working alongside the candidate for such a limited amount of time. There's no better similation or signal for reality than reality itself. You can't ramp a team or company at "hyper-growth" speed this way, but I'm of the opinion doing that sort of thing is almost never a good idea anyway.
jfarmer 8y ago
The research says work-sample tests and structured interviews are the way to go and they're well within reach for a startup. In fact, they're easier for a startup in many ways: half the difficulty in implementing a structured process is the internal selling + training + reinforcement necessary to roll it out across multiple teams/functions/etc. Behavioral questions don't have to be squishy. There's a lot of literature (like, over a century) about conducting and evaluating behavioral interviews. Here are some example questions one might ask a programmer: - How do you know when your code is ready to ship? - What methods or systems do you use to keep track of requirements? - Of all your past managers, who got the most out of your potential? What made their approach effective? - Imagine your professional life a year or two from now. What do you want that to look like and how do you hope this job would contribute to that? - If you realized you couldn't meet an expected release deadline, what would you do? What have you done in the past? - Tell me about a coding mistake you made in a past job that caused a serious problem. What happened and what did you learn from it? - If we talked to your past managers, what would they say your strengths are? What would they say you need to work on? BTW, if this stuff is interesting to anyone, I'm the head of instruction at Strive and we run workshops for engineering managers (including one on evidence-based interviewing). Email me jesse@strive.co if you want to learn more!

im_down_w_otp 8y ago

You can get pretty far with precursor in-person (or video call in a pinch) personality profiling as a screening, some informal probing for motivational biases, a half-day or so of pairing w/ a couple different teammates on the problems they're actually working on, and including the candidate in a directed meeting. This assumes as a hiring manager you've done your work to fully understand the need you're hiring for, not just the skill set. That you know how this need fits into the composite model of the team and the company. And, that you've prepared and trained the team to be able to assess and give you the specific kinds of feedback you need to derive from tbeir working alongside the candidate for such a limited amount of time. There's no better similation or signal for reality than reality itself. You can't ramp a team or company at "hyper-growth" speed this way, but I'm of the opinion doing that sort of thing is almost never a good idea anyway.

jfarmer 8y ago

The research says work-sample tests and structured interviews are the way to go and they're well within reach for a startup. In fact, they're easier for a startup in many ways: half the difficulty in implementing a structured process is the internal selling + training + reinforcement necessary to roll it out across multiple teams/functions/etc. Behavioral questions don't have to be squishy. There's a lot of literature (like, over a century) about conducting and evaluating behavioral interviews. Here are some example questions one might ask a programmer: - How do you know when your code is ready to ship? - What methods or systems do you use to keep track of requirements? - Of all your past managers, who got the most out of your potential? What made their approach effective? - Imagine your professional life a year or two from now. What do you want that to look like and how do you hope this job would contribute to that? - If you realized you couldn't meet an expected release deadline, what would you do? What have you done in the past? - Tell me about a coding mistake you made in a past job that caused a serious problem. What happened and what did you learn from it? - If we talked to your past managers, what would they say your strengths are? What would they say you need to work on? BTW, if this stuff is interesting to anyone, I'm the head of instruction at Strive and we run workshops for engineering managers (including one on evidence-based interviewing). Email me jesse@strive.co if you want to learn more!