4 ms·

I love this story. I wish it was easier to hire for that. I've had candidates that solidly passed my gut check but got vetoed on technical calls because of triv

I love this story. I wish it was easier to hire for that. I've had candidates that solidly passed my gut check but got vetoed on technical calls because of trivia. Our company has a format for interviews that has worked well for us but I'm positive we've lost out on potential because of where we set the bar. I go into every phone screen and interview with the intent to hire the person speaking with and I try to make that clear. I think this has done well for me and the candidates because we both have the same goal.

zw123456 4y ago
Yup, one reason why I am no longer a manager, I switched tracks to research many years back. I felt it had become untenable with so many other people they started inserting into the process it was no longer really my call who I hired. Also, I sort of shortened the story above, but the other intangible thing I saw others maybe would not have picked up on is when I gave all the candidates a tour around our set up, we had these Symbolics computers to do some back end AI stuff (early days stuff) and we needed a Symbolics slayer. I just saw the look in his face when he saw those things, you could tell he was truly excited about working on them. They all said they wanted to work on them of course but just how he looked at them.... I just felt like that was going to make a difference. In today's world it would not fly if I told HR that I was choosing this guy because he looked at the computer equipment they way a dude looks at a sexy lady.
- webmaven 4y ago
  > In today's world it would not fly if I told HR that I was choosing this guy because he looked at the computer equipment they way a dude looks at a sexy lady. I'm pretty sure that you can imagine the sort of problem you might be setting up for the organization. If not, I'll spell it out: if you select candidates based on whether they are eye-fucking the hardware, you may just end up with a bunch of technosexuals on the payroll who aren't necessarily as good at their jobs as you hoped they would be.

zw123456 4y ago

Yup, one reason why I am no longer a manager, I switched tracks to research many years back. I felt it had become untenable with so many other people they started inserting into the process it was no longer really my call who I hired. Also, I sort of shortened the story above, but the other intangible thing I saw others maybe would not have picked up on is when I gave all the candidates a tour around our set up, we had these Symbolics computers to do some back end AI stuff (early days stuff) and we needed a Symbolics slayer. I just saw the look in his face when he saw those things, you could tell he was truly excited about working on them. They all said they wanted to work on them of course but just how he looked at them.... I just felt like that was going to make a difference. In today's world it would not fly if I told HR that I was choosing this guy because he looked at the computer equipment they way a dude looks at a sexy lady.

webmaven 4y ago
> In today's world it would not fly if I told HR that I was choosing this guy because he looked at the computer equipment they way a dude looks at a sexy lady. I'm pretty sure that you can imagine the sort of problem you might be setting up for the organization. If not, I'll spell it out: if you select candidates based on whether they are eye-fucking the hardware, you may just end up with a bunch of technosexuals on the payroll who aren't necessarily as good at their jobs as you hoped they would be.