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One of the things she's best at is judging people. She's one of those rare individuals with x-ray vision for character. She can see through any kind of faker al
by alexpotato 3y ago
One of the things she's best at is judging people. She's one of those rare individuals with x-ray vision for character. She can see through any kind of faker almost immediately. Her nickname within YC was the Social Radar, and this special power of hers was critical in making YC what it is
A manager at a past job also had a similar "x-ray vision".
During interviews, she would always sit in with another interviewer and never ask any questions of the candidates. She would just observe.
Over 5 years of working with her, every single person she said we should hire turned out great. Every person she said was no good, turned out to not be great.
This was particularly fascinating to watch when she was the lone dissenter either way. e.g. there were times where 7 out of 8 interviewers said "pass", she said "hire" and she was always right.
The first time I read pg's essay about Jessica, it immediately reminded me of my old manager.
It also reminds me of a story from, I believe, Malcolm Gladwell's Blink about the tennis coach who knew before a tennis player served if they would double fault.
Some people have either a natural gift or their brains have picked up a set of weights for their internal neural network that make them fantastic at this kind of thing.
- dpflan 3y agoDevil's Advocate: what are the counter examples for her x-ray vision for character?
- jjtheblunt 3y agoFounders at Work starts with the assertion that a sprinter is never faster than out of the blocks. As a one time sprinter, i read that, knew it totally false, and it invalidated my trust in reading further. So i wasted money buying that book. If one publishes so carelessly, it’s sad.
- slushh 3y agoNot necessary a counter example but with all the Reddit drama right now, I would like to know her opinion on Steve Huffman and if he is fulfilling expectations.
- bjhess 3y agoLooks like she has an interview with him on her podcast. :)
- ianmcgowan 3y agoNot to be argumentative, but how did someone get hired if 7 out of 8 interviewers said "pass"? What's the point of having 7 interviewers if only one of them gets to decide? Definitely agree with your point that some people have a gift for this kind of thing, so just genuinely curious how the 7 of 8 thing worked.
- morley 3y agoI've read before -- though right now I can't think of the source -- that if a group of interviewers are weakly against a candidate but one is strongly for them, you should trust the instincts of the person who's "strongly for." When hiring, I'd probably have that than a room of people who are weakly for a candidate on the basis that you'd rather have a person who's great at one thing than someone who's okay at everything.
- tomhallett 3y agoAre there any books on this topic that anyone would recommend? As a manager, this is where I struggled the most - naturally i am someone who strives to be a consensus builder, but it's hard to know when to put your thumb on the scale vs not.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ZephyrBlu 3y agoRead this and you will understand why consensus often doesn't make sense in hiring: https://erikbern.com/2020/01/13/how-to-hire-smarter-than-the-market-a-toy-model.html https://erikbern.com/2020/01/13/how-to-hire-smarter-than-the....
- dan-robertson 3y agoYou might take lots of peoples opinions into account but that doesn’t mean you should do so by majority vote. Some of those people may have been more confident than others. And it could make sense to allow for more variance in hiring (eg for hiring interns, or at an investment bank or big law firm where many new hires are sent out after a year so the cost of a bad hire isn’t so high)
- saghm 3y ago> During interviews, she would always sit in with another interviewer and never ask any questions of the candidates. She would just observe. I'd honestly be a little unnerved by this as an interviewee. I've seen interview shadowing before for people first starting to interview (and in the past have both shadowed and been shadowed), but having someone watch me like that not to learn how to interview but to just focus on monitoring me would feel very different. I definitely have an above average amount of social anxiety though, and one of the biggest things that induces it for me is not getting feedback about whether I'm communicating clearly, so maybe this is specific to me and not generally how people would react,
- geodel 3y agoI mean it is all fine. There are other more suitable candidates for them and other more suitable jobs for you. Else we would be totally fungible which I am sure employees wouldn't want (though employers may).
- burnished 3y agoFor another data point I'm not sure I would notice until later unless there were cues that one person wasn't simply taking the lead.
- gus_massa 3y agoMy guess is that this kind of people will add a few remarks here and there, look at the persons doing one question, look at you while you answers, look at the other person doing the question, smile, look at you while you answers, make a small nod, ... Not stare at you with the eyes open like a cartoon character.
- mywittyname 3y agoI would hope someone would introduce the person as, "just observing." My past few jobs required interviewer training, which involved observing interviews. So pretty much any interview I was involved in had an observer.
- iamwil 3y ago
- asveikau 3y agoI am extremely skeptical of someone who claims this ability in themselves or others. What this tells me is that someone is misjudging a lot of circumstances very confidently. You just can't understand people on a snap judgment, there are too many outliers. Imagine if we applied this kind of thinking in courts. We would convict a lot of innocent people. We wouldn't feel that we need to wait for all the facts and evidence to come in, because our radar for people is so good. We don't do it that way, because it's nonsense.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago> snap judgment What this manager did isn't practically different from what all interviewers do, except the particular manager wasn't the specific target of the usual manipulations[0] candidates will do to seem better. The manager is likely to have a better understanding of how the candidate bullshits (or if they do) when they're not the target of the bullshit. [0] Used as a descriptor; e.g. "manipulating" someone to decide they should see a doctor for their toe infection isn't bad.
- mywittyname 3y ago> except the particular manager wasn't the specific target of the usual manipulations[0] candidates will do to seem better. There's merit to this argument. Consider people who get scammed or catfished -- it's obvious to an outside observer. You're less likely to fool yourself when you have no skin in the game.
- notatoad 3y agoYeah, this always seems like a truism. If you give people opportunities, they will tend to succeed. If you deny people opportunities, they won’t. So anybody in the position of giving or denying opportunities to people will tend to be “right” most of the time.
- saeranv 3y agoGood point. So when we try and evaluate a person's "social radar", we should probably limit ourselves to cases where they are the minority dissenter and the person they dislike is given the opportunity, since it gives us the most controlled scenario in which we can evaluate their hypothesis.
- cutenewt 3y agoFascinating story! Your x-ray vision manager: what (interview) questions or criteria did she use?
- p0pcult 3y agoNot op, but >she would always sit in with another interviewer and never ask any questions of the candidates. She would just observe.
- hgsgm 3y agoMaybe the secret to being a good evaluator is to not do a distracting different task at the same time.
- alexpotato 3y agoChris Voss talks about this in his book "Never Split the Difference". He advocates for teams of people handling a negotiation with the most experienced negotiator just observing. The reason: it's incredibly difficult to be process, crafting and delivering responses in real time. If your primary goal is to observe the other side, that should be your sole focus. It's also incredibly valuable to have that observation hence why you should negotiate in teams (or at least pairs).
- weikju 3y agoI learned this from Star Trek TOS where Khan congratulates Kirk on letting Spock question him while Kirk observes.
- alexpotato 3y agoYou are correct.
- cm2012 3y agoBasically anyone who can do this kind of thing falls into INFP or INFJ in Myers-Briggs. They're just incredible at reading people. Based on the article I'd be shocked if Jessica wasn't an INFP.
- scarnz 3y agoFascinating. I've never heard this about INFP/F types, though I am one. Can you describe more about your experiences or point me to some examples?
- cm2012 3y agoThere's a lot of sources out there on this topic, but Psychology Junkie is way better than I would have expected from the name. Two articles that mention these traits: INFJ: https://www.psychologyjunkie.com/understanding-infj-intuition/ https://www.psychologyjunkie.com/understanding-infj-intuitio... INFP: https://www.psychologyjunkie.com/the-infp/ https://www.psychologyjunkie.com/the-infp/
- scarnz 3y agoThanks, I appreciate the links. I happen to be in a new leadership role and in the middle of a hiring decision.
- vladd 3y agohttps://www.16personalities.com/personality-types https://www.16personalities.com/personality-types is a pretty good (and free) resource to get started in this field.
- choppaface 3y agoFalse. First, one person’s Myers-Briggs score can drift over time. Any of those letters can flip; being an “empath” is learnable. Second, people like Jessica and other evaluators do a lot (both reported and unreported) to set and move the goalposts that define success. What this article and discussion shows is less of a “some people are magic” phenomenon and more of a “a lot of evaluators and leaders have huge blindspots” phenomenon. Most all panels bias towards false negatives; there’s a lot of support for having too narrow a perspective on any given candidate.
- thebigwinning 3y agoI can take a wild guess about some traits she never selected.
- neilv 3y ago> e.g. there were times where 7 out of 8 interviewers said "pass", she said "hire" and she was always right. Just noting: that situation around that assessment can affect the outcome. For example, hired person appreciates the opportunity/faith extended to them, or otherwise picks up on the need to rise to the occasion. Or a manager or other staff sees/treats the person differently because of the circumstances (e.g., gives the hire more guidance because they think the hire will need it, wants the hire to succeed because a founder has blessed them, or just sees the person more favorably because they trust the opinion of someone else).
- Jarwain 3y agoI mean yes, but not everyone succeeds despite best efforts, and a good social radar might imply detecting whether they Will rise to the occasion or not
- jxf 3y ago> For example, hired person appreciates the opportunity/faith extended to them, or otherwise picks up on the need to rise to the occasion. I don't think it would make sense to tell a hired person "you barely got in here, everybody hated you except for one interviewer".
- neilv 3y agoMany people can pick up on that situation, during or after.
- cbzoiav 3y agoDepends how you phrase it. "Jessica is the reason we hired you - she says you'll be great here and when she says that she's always right" technically says "we weren't going to hire you", but also "we all believe in you".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- neilv 3y agoThis sounds sorta like one of my observations about someone I worked with: she'd go into an enterprise prospect/relationship meeting, and come out with better insights than the other people from our team. And the insights rang true. (And it was unfortunate that she wasn't listened to more, because a higher-ranking person would more often miss cues about customer thinking, or would come out of a meeting seeming to feel a gist biased more towards what they wanted it to be.) For that skill/quality and others, I later tried to recruit her as a startup CEO.
- gnicholas 3y ago> It also reminds me of a story from, I believe, Malcolm Gladwell's Blink about the tennis coach who knew before a tennis player served if they would double fault. I believe it was from watching the serve, but not seeing where the ball went. As someone who has played tennis for many years (but not remotely professionally), it always seemed to me that the coach could simply be reading the player's expression. When you're serving, you can typically tell based on how the contact felt, and the sound it made, whether your serve was going in. It wouldn't be surprising if that could be 'read' from your face.