My Notes on Hiring People (User’s Perspective)

Some say hiring is the single most important activity in a company. No wonder, the impact is so big. New hire contributes a culture to a growing company. On the other side, company hires people to define their culture.

Anyway, there are tons of insightful notes out there on hiring people. You can’t really know which one is really based on meaningful experience or just some sweet quotes taken from some random influencer. But here in this writing, I’ll assure you that I only write stuff that I’ve validated throughout my career.

This note suites best for founders and product managers as I’m looking from their perspectives. Would love to have feedbacks and be sure to check it out from time to time, it’s a living doc.

Note:

• Got first feedback already on how HR practices are more advanced than just a simple interview. Try not to dive deeper into it as I write this note from user’s side, but it’s worth mentioning so I edited the interview part.

The notes:

1. Hire slow is real. Don’t let time hinder your mission to find the best recruit. When we hire fast, we compromise the quality and we will regret it since.. it’s sooo hard to fire people.
2. So, fire fast isn’t that worthy of advice. When you have a growth and people-centric mindset in mind, it’s hard to see an underperforming talent as firing material. It’s easier to see them as growth potential candidates and try to find solution for them. But it’s soooo hard to nurture people. You’ll let yourself and the company suffer as the consequences.
3. I used to only do resume screening and interviews. It didn’t work. A resume can easily lie. Interviews are subjective. When you don’t have enough experience to read people, and don’t have a gifted interviewer from your HR side, then it’s easy to miss the important details.
4. It’s definitely better when we use tests. From skill test to psychological one. It’s better, only if it’s really being used well on hiring. I use tests to screen people. At least now I have more satisfaction when interviewing, I don’t meet some random guy with a sparky resume but has no real experience and intelligence to back it up.
5. And this test is complemented by a solid tiering, skill mapping, and position requirement. After the result came out, we can have a good comparison between the candidate and our existing talent. Also, we can see if the candidate really fit with the requirement of the vacant position. For example, for a customer management product team, I picked a candidate that strong in business process and disregard the one that has better creativity but weaker business acumen.
6. Sometimes, I do more than a written test. I bring the candidate into a real simulation. Once, I brought some candidates to an internal ideation workshop. There, their attitude, their creativity, their personality, laid almost bare.
7. But still, don’t let hiring decisions fall into one person. Even with the tests, the simulation, I still almost missed one of the best hires I’ve ever done. If not for an initiative to ask an opinion of other participants in the ideation event, I’d pick a different person. It’s true that that one guy might also perform well. But, it’s said that only a small percentage of recruit that will be successful, so huge probability that the other candidate might not be performing as good. So yeah, I almost lost one great recruit.
8. Hire someone better than you is real. Especially for higher positions. The challenge is to really understand your quality and define what it means by ‘better than you’. I used to don’t have a real framework on that, and I failed to really have someone better. There’s a case where we hire a new manager which unable to quickly perform and creates contention among teams. It’s an awful experience for both.
9. What managers fear most when hiring someone better than them is that new recruit will steal their position and render them obsolete. Sadly, it’s true. If there are no real criteria to recruit them, it will create a useless competition and political mess. Startups don’t have time for internal competition. Too much work to do, why working on the same thing with the same method.
10. That’s why don’t pick the same cherry. See what’s lacking on an individual, then hire someone better than them on that very aspect. It’s how that individual will learn but not feel threatened.
11. Not only work contribution, but cultural contribution also matters. Complacency, comfort zone, will kill the company. Having more people help the existing employee to see there’s a different world out there.
12. But.. it’s so hard to manage the clash. There’s a limit to how diverse you can be. Hiring someone with toxicity without any elixir in hand will create unnecessary pain. It’s not the variety of toxic that you’re looking for. It’s the knowledge, work ethic, method, value, and virtue.