For what it’s worth, at Facebook the general hiring process is in two steps. There’s a centralized hire/no hire that most people are aware of and then a second phase where team selection happens. This is where all the “hire for weakness” steps that the author mention happen. Teams are looking at this pool of people for speciality, levels... that they need and where the matchmaking happens.<p>There are also a lot of smaller but specialized longstanding loops like front-end, AI... and one off “reqs” for special roles that teams need.<p>The world of hiring is very fascinating :)
>Instead of “how can we find the smartest people?” think about “how can we find people who will make our team stronger?”<p>I would have thought that was obvious? Why would you hire someone unless you had a need for their talents?<p>I guess I'm probably thinking small-business. At the biggest companies, they probably just hire and hope to fit them in because hiring for exact needs doesn't really scale.
I had an interesting call once asking me to interview for marketing job at a women's online fashion business.<p>I said to the person "not sure IM the right person, I'm male and have zero interest in fashion". To which she replied "That's great because I've got plenty of that fit, I want someone that looks at this more as a business than personal interest"<p>I never interviewed as they salary was low, but I really liked that approach. I find that 'must love and be passionate about our company products' a little overdone, especially in the US. Its healthy to have people with different points of view, and staff that use alternatives and can discuss why.
Two personal counterexamples, whether right or wrong:<p>Management consulting<p>- you want to be perceived as hiring the best<p>- project work that is not known in advance, you need very versatile people<p>- looking for demonstrated desire to jump through the hoops and do the marginal work that makes you the "top"<p>Software Engineering<p>- some overlap with the reasons above<p>- adds to the moat: if they're happy working for FAANG et al, competitors are priced out of getting the best<p>- the economics of many technologies are now defined by whether they can return enough to pay people competitively vs big tech. E.g. there are lots of cool deep learning applications that are tougher to try when you need to pay 300k / year for someone really good to run with them<p>- I'm interested in the sibling post referencing moneyball, this would be very cool to see applied to software engineers
> “We hire top talent”<p>These phrases are mainly intended to flatter the employees, to make them grateful for being "chosen", and maybe to increase trust and confidence among them.<p>Choosing who to hire (once basic requirements are met), is much less important than the morale and attitudes among employees. Much better to say "top talent" than "randomly picked".<p>But, the hiring process is a huge factor in the perception of the identity of the employees.
Knowing to hire for weakness instead of "top talent" implies a level of reflection almost no medium+ sized company actually has. Most companies don't need top talent, and the talent they have isn't anywhere close to the top.
Exactly. Some traits are always good, some always bad and yet others depend on context.<p>For example I currently work with a team with a lot of very hard working technical people but not enough concern for questions like "what's valuable for us to work on?". So I need to hire people who will ask those questions.<p>On the other hand, if my team was full of big picture pontificators, I'd be looking for someone who's shut up and code for a change.
this whole thing reads: don't hire top talent, hire special talent, to us, whatever. The latter sounds even harder than the former. It's hard to see your own weakness, it's rarer to have people to fill an exact particular gap at that particular point in time.<p>Maybe do away with the mindset of people as off-the-shelf products and think about them more as raw resources and focus more on upskilling. Universities are hopeless on this so the responsibility must fall on to someone.
Amazes me how little data-driven recruiting is. Just as the author puts it, a good hire is for culture ad, and that means being explicitly aware of what's missing. Tough stuff to really look inside and see what's missing.<p>Most hires I see are either out of desperation or because the recruiter had a good chemistry with the candidate. A 1h interview means 0,3% of the time I will work with that person in one year. Talk about a small sample size.<p>(shameless plug): I built this for figuring out the candidate personality: <a href="https://freyasense.com/recruiting/" rel="nofollow">https://freyasense.com/recruiting/</a>
The article spends most of its words trying to convince the reader to do it, and only a few paragraphs on how to do it. I was convinced in the first paragraph.<p>My own experience shows that hiring for your team's weaknesses can make it more effective. In 2013, I went from an operations-heavy role to a new team with little operations experience. Our TL designed and coded a new service. He was not happy with the feedback I gave through the design & code review process. Before deploying the new service to production, we met with one of the company's top engineers (Sanjay Ghemawat) for a "production readiness review". The reviewer was impressed and found only a couple of minor issues. He said that it was rare for him to review a service and find no major issues. Many of the questions he asked during the review were things that I had brought up earlier and convinced our TL to fix. Although I had not written any code on the service, I contributed operational knowledge and filled a weakness of the team.<p>Our TL did not acknowledge my contribution and even gave me a bad review, costing me about $80k in compensation. Now, years later, I believe that he did that to get me to leave the team. I had often pushed to fix the major problems in our project. I think he wanted to keep control and continue working on fun things and ignore the problems. Our manager went along with him, building his own empire. I left and the person who took my place had the same problem and left as soon as they could. Honesty and respectfulness are important qualities of teams and team members because they develop trust. Trust makes teams more productive. An internal study at Google concluded that teams with members who trust each other are much more productive than teams with high technical ability and low trust [0]. Lack of trust is a team weakness that we can hire to improve. We can also intentionally train and practice skills that improve team trust.<p>I want a systematic way to identify the strengths and weaknesses of myself, my teammates, and potential teammates. I want a questionnaire like the one in Essential Enneagram which was tested in a study with 1,000 participants [1].<p>I wish the large tech companies would invest in this kind of work and publish it.<p>[0] <a href="https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/" rel="nofollow">https://rework.withgoogle.com/print/guides/5721312655835136/</a><p>[1] <a href="https://drdaviddaniels.com/enneagram-test/" rel="nofollow">https://drdaviddaniels.com/enneagram-test/</a>
More of a perception change rather than an actual change I think. FWIW, I've always hired to "fill gaps" and not to "add stars". Now, do I want a great person who can fill that gap? Sure. But the priority is the gap, not the person.<p>There are those mythical people for whom "if you interview they will 'make' a position so they can hire you" is said to be true. In my experience, people who are hired because they seem like super stars rather than for a particular role, do not do as well. Why? Because it usually automatically puts them in conflict with the person who is already doing that role, and second, what they should be doing isn't immediately apparent leading to some meandering around which is perceived by upper management as being 'non-productive.'
Brilliantly put.<p>And I think the same goes for talent development, too. Career ladders, carelessly applied, incentivize everyone to do all the same things to check the boxes for the next level. This can lead to a lot of mediocre impact.<p>I would suggest that we really want is well rounded teams, where individuals are playing to their strengths. It takes a more nuanced approach to evaluation, because not everyone is doing the same things in the same way.
This seems like an oversimplification of what it takes to make a company grow and succeed. Is it either a) hire top talent or b) hire for weakness.<p>The question this article is posing is the wrong one, it’s neither a nor b. Companies need to hire based on what they need most, sometimes it’s profit, sometimes value, sometimes all of the above.<p>This article feels like it’s based on a strawman.
If you want a competitive advantage and having a better team than the competition helps with that, then you are looking for a team that is better than the competition's. This is what you hire for. If the competition is very good, you need to perform better - that does not mean every member of your team needs to be better than every member of the competition's team, except when it has to. For example, take professional tennis players: they need top trainers, top physicians and top managers to be #1. Hiring someone that is not experienced just because they can ask the right questions... will not work. Even asking the right questions require very good knowledge, otherwise they will ask random questions. You don't want to fly in a plane built by someone without experience, but asking smart questions.
I recently discovered that, in a topgrading-style interview, it’s possible to filibuster!<p>They expect to be able to ask 4+ questions about every job from the past ten years. But I will happily ramble for 20 minutes about minutia for each of them. It was wonderful
The article assumes that most teams know and openly talk about what their weaknesses are. But is that actually a common thing? Don't we have a natural drive to ignore our weaknesses and blame them on others?<p>It's a little funny, because the alternative phrasing also includes that already.<p>One hires the best of the best without specifying the best of <what>.<p>"The best people will solve all the problems!" without any inclination about what the problems are.<p>Doesn't that imply that one doesn't actually know one's own problems and hopes that if one can just hire a people smarter than oneself, they will figure it out for you?
I think that managers should have to take the GMAT as part of the hiring process, even if they got their MBA 20 years ago. They need to know number properties and have basic critical reasoning skills for the roles that they are interviewing for. Why give them a free pass while requiring principal engineers with 20 years experience to answer leetcode problems? The low quality management at large organizations is an obvious sign that they're not screening for the best talent, who clearly scores at least 700 on the GMAT.
First we must ask the question: how can we demoralize people the most effectively? An obvious place to start is to just ignore all their prior work. Since we're starting from scratch we need a baseline to gather where their technical skills are at. So you should ask them to do some kind of coding assessment task. Tell them not to spend more than an hour on it. Chances are good the most desperate will spend way more on it because they need the job. If you're lucky they'll even do it without asking for payment.<p>Spice it up a little! Why not throw in some real work that no one in your company wants to do? You can even ask the applicant to read your organizations repo code and write technical reports on it. That way, later if you do decide to hire them (unlikely) it will reduce your on-boarding costs... and if not... then fuck it, tbh. This isn't about making people feel good. It's about making sure you do what everyone else does. 'We've found that the assessment task is a good signal.'<p>Speaking of signals, how about you ignore the whole resume and focus on what matters. We both know resumes are largely a waste of time and people only get moved up in interviews for making plenty of eye contact. So make sure to fail everyone who doesn't stare at you the whole time. This is how to assess technical skills the most accurate way possible and its known the vast majority of managers fail people in interviews for not staring at them enough (staring increases productivity.)<p>Finally, you don't want to forget the computer science tests. At least four years in school and tons of debt is a lot to stomach compared to people who learned practical skills in their own time at a cost of almost nothing. Though chances are almost zero you use computer science knowledge in your job it's best to make sure you fail every self-taught developer who can't immediately balance a binary dick tree. It shouldn't concern you how many developers are self-taught and won't fit in your talent pipe line after doing this. Your hour long algorithm interviews are sure to make sure that only people who want to feel smart get hired.<p>If you put these measures into place you're sure to build the most mediocre organization possible. But there are other ways to improve the process. Experiment with calling your company 'remote' but only hire from certain timezones; Make sure the interviews happen in person. Hold as many meetings as possible. If there's one thing engineers love it's meetings that break up focused concentration time in their day. Even better if the meetings are only done at certain times in the day as that will be as hostile as possible to a remote working environment.<p>I want to make sure you don't have any funny ideas in your head about remote working. It might seem to offer flexible time management but people are ultimately children and its up to you to put in place measures to prevent this. If you do this right you can even manage to exclude people with chronic illnesses that would have otherwise been able to fit in your talent pipeline through remote work which I think is really something.<p>I hope this post has been helpful to other recruiters and hiring managers out there. Peace
That is what most companies do. When you have an over supply of backend engineers but need frontend engineers no one looks for more backend engineers. Their stack has a weakness of frontend engineers and they find the one that strengthens it the most.
I think this guy might be on to something.<p>Every time you add a person to the team who is more stupid than you, it pushes you further up the stack rank.<p>Why hire people with loyalty when you can hire people who can't quit because they can't find their way out of the building?<p>Don't waste money on high salaries, just find people too dumb to realize you are paying them in Monopoly money.<p>Soon you will be the top performer by a huge margin, and it's bonus city, baby!
Thanks to the rate of bitcoin appreciation it doesn't matter where I work. I can make the same or more than the top companies. I can opt out of the crazy hiring process
Talent is everything. Without Elon Musk, or Von Braun there are no key rocket program break throughs.<p>Not that I know much about rockets, just that there are key talented people that push the world forward. You need the worker bees. But someone at the top has to be the visionary genius.<p>If was the manager of a soccer team that came in last in the League. One way of improving would be to replace my weakest players. And the team would probably marginally improve. But it doesn't usually happen that way. Chances are your best players are not talented enough either, and you should replace those too. Or Perhaps, trading two of your good players for one more talented. Which is typically what happens.<p>So not sure if I would agree with the premise of the article.<p>Also, If I was building a stock portfolio, one not terrible way of doing it would probably be around how many PhDs the companies have on the payroll.