The search for employees should not start with the question "how can we hire the best?" , but from the question "what are our weaknesses?" ...
Why are you hiring people? Are you hiring to do more or achieve more ?
Design your hiring process to select people who strengthen the team's weaknesses, rather than looking for the best.
Don't think about "how to hire the smartest?" , but about "how to find people who can make the team stronger?" ...
People are not just cadres. An organization can enhance or suppress the skills of people. She can build up their skills or bury their talent.
Often the terminology used by the likes of HR suggests that they see people as resources.
“We hire the best , ” “the candidate falls short of our requirements , ” “our hiring funnel picks the best , ” “we hire smart people and don't interfere with their work . ” We come up with “fair tests” , which are “objective assessments” of how well people fit our prejudices about the right level.
Talent seekers start out with the premise that they want to hire the smartest people from the talent pool. If we could only hire the smartest, that would give us a competitive edge!
Will you win if you focus on hiring great people and can find people slightly smarter than your competitors? Advances in technology rarely spring solely from the genius of one person. Success doesn't have a single reason.
We are dealing with very complex systems; teams that can understand and combine the abilities of many people will win.
With the right approach, a team can be smarter than each of its members. The wrong approach can make the team disastrously stupid; suffering from overconfidence and herd thinking, conflicting and weaving intrigue. Hiring the right people , not the smartest people, helps create the right team atmosphere and increases the chances of winning.
| The talent search mindset | Installation to eliminate weak points |
| Find the best employee | Find skills that unlock our potential |
| Enlarge team | Convert command |
| Help teams do more | Help teams achieve more |
| People who can do what we do | People who can do what we cannot |
| Hire the best | Hire the person who suits the team best |
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When we start out with the intention of finding “the best people,” it shapes the entire hiring process.
We indicate in our job descriptions our prejudices about what is good. We come up with a series of obstacles and interviews to filter out candidates who don't match our prejudices. Those who successfully survived the interview are rewarded with an offer, and only then we think about how best to use them.
The hiring process is centralized to maximize efficiency and productivity. We look at the KPIs related to the number of candidates at each stage of the funnel and the metrics of transition to the next stages.
Hiring commissions are formed and processes are standardized. We strive to provide the most honest assessment of each candidate using the same criteria.
We praise ourselves for hiring only the top 1% in the funnel. We are hiring "top talent" and working for the company is a privilege. We are the best of the best.
Be wary of placing too much emphasis on hypotheses in interview feedback.
• Didn't use [my preferred] idioms
• Had to write tests
• Didn't find [what I think] was the best solution
• Couldn't abstract x
• Didn't know [what * I * know]
What * demonstrated * the candidate?
Weak Point Hiring
There is another approach. To start not with the idea of ​​"talent" and the strengths that we need, but proceed from our weaknesses . What is missing in our team and what will enable us to achieve more?
Maybe we have a team of seniors who often have difficulty with analysis. To act, we need a fresh perspective.
Maybe we are suffering from herd mentality and we need someone with a different experience and new perspectives. Someone capable of starting a fruitful debate.
We may have all the technical skills, but no one knows how to lead discussions. We cannot make the most of the team.
Maybe we all fear further scaling issues. We would need someone with experience who can inspire us to solve problems.
Maybe everyone on the team specializes in frontend and we need to develop and use a data service. We could learn this, but bringing in someone with experience would allow us to learn faster.
We may all be software developers, but we spend most of our time diagnosing and operating systems in production. Let's add SRE to the command.
Maybe we don't even know where our weaknesses are until we work with the right person to show us how to reach our potential.
Identify your weaknesses. Use them when writing vacancies and designing interview processes.
Design your interviews to determine what the candidate can bring to the team. How does it reduce your weakness and what strengths does it add?
Make it easy for your interviews to find out what people can bring to your team, even if you didn't know you needed it.
The talent-based hiring process evaluates a candidate against the definition of a good employee. The weakness-based recruitment process uses collaboration with the candidate to see if they can make the team stronger.
Whenever possible, try to hire candidates who can already join the real work in the company. If this is not possible for some of the parties, then come up with exercises that allow people on your side to collaborate with the candidates.
Solve the problem in pairs. Do not arrange what many companies call paired interviews, when the interviewee is actually watching the candidate write the code. Instead, actually work on a collaborative solution. Help the candidate. Share ideas. Agree on who will enter the code, as it would be when paired with a colleague. Do not judge him if he solved the same problems that you solved; see what you can achieve together .
If you hire candidates to cover your weaknesses, it sometimes means that you will refuse even a qualified and experienced one, because his skills are already on the team.
If you hire candidates to cover your weaknesses, sometimes say yes to an inexperienced person who is good at asking the right questions. Someone whose feedback will help the experienced engineers on the team ensure the systems are easy to operate.
Why not use both approaches?
It is often worth reflecting on the fact that the good is not always the best for you. There are rarely “best practices” ; there are only practices that have proven their usefulness in a specific context.
I see a great need for recruiting talent in addition to recruiting to compensate for weaknesses.
You may need a mechanism to provide some kind of correspondence. A mechanism for selecting those who share the values ​​of the organization. In order to find people with enough common basic skills to increase the likelihood of being able to transfer them to different teams. Long-standing and continuously funded organizations are a luxury not available to all organizations.
If you receive thousands of job responses per day, then you probably need a signal-to-noise ratio mechanism. Especially if you don't want to use the results of your studies as a filter.
I suspect that a lot of the hiring problems stem from people copying the (highly visible) talent recruiting practices used in large companies. They copy and paste the entire hiring mechanism for their small team.
Start by reflecting on your weaknesses. Whose help can you use? Some of the talent recruiting practices can be helpful, but don't make it a foundation. If you want strong teams, start with your weaknesses.
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