How to hire low experience, high potential people

People&#x27;s intuitions around hiring aren&#x27;t Bayesian enough. I think a good process reduces down to something like:<p>- Are they smart? (understands quickly + communicates effectively)<p>- Are they cool? (won&#x27;t put poison in the keurig + pleasant to be around)<p>- Are they high energy? (initiative + action bias)<p>- Do they have the experience needed to be successful in the role?<p>Those are pretty strong priors for success. If you find someone with all the above, you&#x27;ve got an ~80% chance of a hit. No need to over-complicate.<p>In my experience, adding more boxes tends to index towards box-checkers who grew up wealthy. That&#x27;s how you miss the hyper-smart&#x2F;diligent state school kids who happened to spend their summers working instead of doing model UN.

We built Fly.io resume-blind and without interviews, hiring people at every level of experience without having to make decisions based on that experience. We did it by throwing away all this stuff, ditching interviews, and replacing them with work-sample tests. Some of the best people on our team, the best I&#x27;ve worked with in my whole career, are working here in their first job in our field.<p>I&#x27;m a little grumpy about this &quot;diamonds in the rough&quot; shit. I&#x27;m more concerned about what&#x27;s lurking in the diamond mines. If people can demonstrate that they can do the work, I don&#x27;t much need to know if &quot;they have a chip on their shoulders&quot;. More generally: I have zero faith in anyone&#x27;s ability to learn much from psychological interviews.

&gt; “Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.”<p>Utterly ridiculous.

&gt; “Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. Go back to their childhood! I learn a lot about their grit and commitment to excellence from their basketball obsession or maybe their experience caring for a dying parent.<p>God damn that sounds exhausting. How about let&#x27;s skip to the current chapter, titled <i>I&#x27;m Good At Computers And I Want A Job</i>.

This is exactly what I do with my team. I staff the upper levels first with people I trust (people have worked with me for 15 years across 4 different companies now) and then start fleshing out the rest of the teams beneath them with high potential n00bs.<p>Why? Because that’s what I was when I started and now I’m paying it forward.<p>It’s been a very successful model and continues to be.

Some of these questions may be borderline illegal. In my experience interviewing folks for Meta we are taught not to ask such questions because of the obvious bias. Even probing into what neighborhood someone lives in is dubious (oh you grew up on the wrong side of the tracks?). I don’t even look at résumés anymore, although recruiters have to screen them. Focus on the job, if you are conducting a coding interview asking coding questions, maybe ask about something they built in the past for fun&#x2F;work&#x2F;learning . If you’re doing system design ask them to architect something. If you’re doing behavioral interviews this is trickiest but focus on the on the job behaviors, even if their previous job was not tech or they only have educational experience you can see how someone works with others on a project. Personal questions like this are a really bad idea.

I like that this isn&#x27;t your typical skills demo.<p>I changed careers at age 40+, learned to code, now years later enjoying it. It just took someone who thought I could grow.<p>Interestingly I was hired along side some capable, albeit green, college grads. The difference in terms of understanding how a business works, speaking to customers, asking questions &#x2F; follow through to get down to the problem we&#x27;re solving was enormous. They could code circles around me, but they also just wanted to be told exactly what to code and had no interest beyond exactly that.

Having worked predominantly in startups, we&#x27;ve almost always been cash-constrained in hiring. Some of the best hires I&#x27;ve found are highly motivated fresh grads or recent grads. I always look for the desire to prove themselves and take charge and full responsibility of a project; a majority of the times, money is secondary to these folks to the ability to make a difference and prove you&#x27;re capable of completing something difficult. And ultimately, that&#x27;s always something a startup can offer a young employee. That said, I&#x27;ve often had to teach them foundational things, but the desire to learn and get moving quickly outweighs any cons.<p>When I&#x27;ve been at big companies, it&#x27;s all about experience and grey hair, and people become more motivated by money and low risk. I find many times, the quality of the average person at a big company is lower than the average startup fresh grad.

&gt; “Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. Go back to their childhood! I learn a lot about their grit and commitment to excellence from their basketball obsession or maybe their experience caring for a dying parent.<p>I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d be comfortable sharing this much personal information with a stranger on a job interview.<p>Additionally, it sounds more like a psychological evaluation, than evaluation of a person&#x27;s potential at a job. I understand that maybe that&#x27;s exactly the writer&#x27;s intention, but I&#x27;d personally be wary of companies which ask questions like this.

&gt; Most smart people are actually terrible at having the drive&#x2F;follow through to take things to completion. They’ll usually want to give up at the first sign of failure or slowness.<p>You can also hire that really &quot;smart&quot; person from a large co to a startup and watch them be extremely successful in a low-friction environment for crossing the finish line.

&gt; Disagree and commit:<p>I hate that this is such a common thought process. This is something that makes sense for soldiers in the military. But outside of this context (being a low-information cog in a gigantic machine), it&#x27;s terrible. If you can&#x27;t convince domain experts that the plan is sound, then maybe it&#x27;s a bad plan.<p>Honestly, disagree and commit goes against my...<p>&gt; Theory for excellence.

For hiring software engineers, something I read decades ago that has been a consistent indicator for me is Bjarne Stroustrop&#x27;s observation that good programmers are almost always good writers in their native language.<p>In my experience, this includes high level writing skills all the way down to sentence structure, but not including the ability to write in a formal or &quot;educated&quot; register. Basically, it shouldn&#x27;t take a lot of effort to read what they write, on a macro level (what is this about? what are the points being made, and how are they related?) and the micro level (what does this sentence say?)<p>This doesn&#x27;t correlate nearly as directly with formal education as you would think. Some people with a degree and an impressive vocabulary write text that looks like a courtroom transcript of their train of thought, and some people with very little formal education write nicely structured text that is easy to read, even if their dialect of English isn&#x27;t what you&#x27;d find in the New Yorker. It&#x27;s less about formal education than it is about their ability to organize your thoughts and their ability to see their work from another person&#x27;s perspective, which are important skills for many aspects of programming, including writing the code itself.<p>The downside of this criterion is that if you don&#x27;t read someone&#x27;s native language, you can&#x27;t judge them by it, so if you&#x27;re looking at multiple candidates for the same job, it&#x27;s problematic to give one candidate credit if you can&#x27;t judge all of the candidates. On the other hand, writing well in the language the company works in is almost always a valuable skill in its own right, so it&#x27;s rare that you would want to completely disregard a weakness in this area. You just have to be aware that an excellent engineer might struggle a bit in a language that isn&#x27;t native for them.

Every time I read articles like these I cringe hard and feel sad about how far the youngsters of today have to struggle and bear bullshit just to get a good job and be financially independent.<p>People just starting out with their careers do not deserve to be subjected to such horribly intrusive and manipulative approaches from recruiters. They are freshers goddammit, you are not supposed to hire them for leadership positions from the get-go. Treat them accordingly and give them space to learn on the job; and if your firm is not capable of doing that yet, go back to hiring based on experience. I have seen way too many large companies of today try to save labor costs by hiring fresh grads and then offloading the responsibilities of C-level leadership onto them so that they don&#x27;t have to pay large salaries to the experienced candidates instead.<p>I myself have been a victim of this pathetic practice - a large startup picked me right out of college and then made me lead the ENTIRE sales and customer experience wing of one of their divisions. With zero prior experience, zero training, just handed the reins from the get-go. This role involved hiring, training, deploying and managing literally a hundred sales executives (all of which had more ground experience than I ever did), chasing insane sales and customer acquisition targets, handling customer analytics for thousands of customers across diverse categories and segments _and_ planning and implementing outreach campaigns while desperately trying to learn the ropes at the same time. The job that I was handling was meant not just for someone more experienced, but for an _entire team_ of analysts, domain experts and mid-level managers. After a year of pushing myself and working literally 90 hours a week I gave up. This startup closed down that division the moment I left and lost ~60% of its overall valuation. From what I hear they have now fired everyone and are just looking for an exit chance. The whole thing was a F-ing nightmare that has scarred me from ever attempting to engage with startups in the future. I have joined a conventional consulting firm as an Associate currently and it&#x27;s unbelievable how rudimentary things like employee training and mature, robust organization is making me feel.<p>To any recruiters reading this, please stop going after low-experience candidates if your organization is not specifically mature and equipped enough to holistically train them.

I never thought I&#x27;d say this, but... I&#x27;d rather grind Leetcode instead of being psychoanalyzed by a &quot;Hip hop enthusiast masquerading as a San Francisco technologist&quot;.

&gt; I really like questions with maximalist qualifiers like &quot;tell me about your best X.” If it&#x27;s not good, you know that their best isn&#x27;t good enough.<p>Note that this approach, when not supplemented by other questions, favors outlier great results over consistent good results. E.g.:<p>Distribution A: 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 1, 100, 2, 1, 3; MAX(A) = 100<p>Distribution B: 72, 73, 78, 79, 44, 75, 78, 79, 78, 79; MAX(B) = 79

Tip #1: You&#x27;re never even going to get an application from these people if your job posting requires 7+ years with AI+Erlang+Azure.<p>If your codebase is C#, would you hire somebody with some Java and Swift, but no C#? If the answer is no, then feel free to scare people away who are not C# experts. But if the answer is yes, reword your job posting. Sure, be clear that you have a C# codebase, but be welcoming to other skill sets.<p>Just because you host your stuff on GCP doesn&#x27;t mean that all applicants have to have experience on GCP. Unless it does. If you are trying to hire somebody who can jump in and solve a specific problem on day 1, then ok. But if you are hiring for potential, your new hire will be an expert in GCP two months after you hire them. You have a four month hiring process anyway. What&#x27;s two more months?

The succinct guidelines from &quot;Mastering the Art of War&quot; (Zhuge Liang, Liu Ju) for interviewing people are still among the best (c.200 &#x2F; 1300 CE). This is also good practive for the interviewee, you want to assess whether or not accepting a job offer at Theranos is a good idea (#5 is perhaps questionable):<p>Hard though it be to know people, there are ways.<p>First is to question them concerning right and wrong, to observe their ideas.<p>Second is to exhaust all their arguments, to see how they change.<p>Third is to consult with them about strategy, to see how perceptive they are.<p>Fourth is to announce that there is trouble, to see how brave they are.<p>Fifth is to get them drunk, to observe their nature.<p>Sixth is to present them with the prospect of gain, to see how modest they are.<p>Seventh is to give them a task to do within a specific time, to see how trustworthy they are.

Everytime I read one of these &quot;how to hire&quot; posts, it&#x27;s always a opinionated clusterfuck of a process that is arbitrary&#x2F;capricious, gameable and biased towards what OP thinks are good traits.<p>This is a problem that is very easy to solve if you were allowed to use proxies for intelligence and grit. Just test for IQ and trait conscientiousness. [1]<p>----<p>[1] IQ is a stronger prediction of on the job performance than anything else. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.steveloh.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;2020&#x2F;5&#x2F;27&#x2F;best-predictor-of-job-performance-especially-for-cognitively-complex-jobs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.steveloh.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;2020&#x2F;5&#x2F;27&#x2F;best-predictor-of-jo...</a>

Wow, the fun I would have in such a process. I would retell Oliver Twist meets Annie. Maybe with a musical number to jazz things up.<p>More like &#x2F;r&#x2F;LinkedinLunatics than HackerNews material.

The list of indicators are great and spot-on.<p>But in terms of how to assess them, a lot of the advice here boils down to &quot;you&#x27;ll know it when you see it.&quot;<p>So I think this advice is best for seasoned hiring managers. If you&#x27;re just starting out, it&#x27;s going to be hard to accurately detect some of the nuance and subjective elements.

Another garbage &quot;how to hire!&quot; article with no data to back it up, just a bunch of opinions. There&#x27;s nothing to indicate whether what this person suggests has any success whatsoever and no data to back it up. How many times did she use this methodology and it didn&#x27;t work out?

You wouldn&#x27;t need to hunt so hard for someone who was &quot;hungry&quot; if what you were hiring for was meaningful work. As it goes this diseased process is the result of abstract BS profit hacking being a huge part of what people are hiring for.

+1 to looking for &quot;wins above replacement&quot; -- there are great players on mediocre teams and weak players on strong teams. The resume tells you what teams they were on but in an interview you need to determine what they really contributed.<p>(One followup question I find myself asking a lot is &quot;you said &#x27;we&#x27; did X, tell me more about who was part of that&quot; -- great people sometimes give away too much of the credit)

I think getting a no-hire signal after spilling your guts about your childhood, birth, and real stories would feel like shit. Same reason as not wanting to write cover letters anymore. If it&#x27;s going into the shredder, who cares? Keep it light and airy.

I think there&#x27;s a simple way:<p>Hire a <i>lot</i> of low experience people (right out of college) and work to identify and retain the exceptional ones.

Easiest way to hire a bunch of young, smart, ambitious people is to work at a place where young, smart ambitious people want to work. Anyone who&#x27;s worked at such a place will tell you it&#x27;s easy in that environment and difficult outside it. The deck is so stacked in your favor at the right place.<p>It&#x27;s much harder to keep the organization mildly functional so that such people want to stay. The number of highly capable, motivated people leaving orgs because &quot;this place is a disaster&quot; is astronomical.

With AR or HUD eyeglasses, there could be a stealthy app for interviewees, which does facerec of the interviewer across from you, quickly scours the Web for things they&#x27;ve written or been indoctrinated in during formative early career, for whatever pop psych, management fad, or astrological litmus tests they&#x27;ll likely believe in for hiring, and then discreetly directs what notes to hit, outlines example &#x27;life&#x27; stories, prompts when to make a particular facial expression, etc.

Speaking as an AS slacker with more gaps than not. Ho ho ho.<p><i>Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o&#x27;clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife...</i>

With drive, anyone can do anything. Almost everyone has had drive at some point. Those that no longer do were punished by the gamed system for trying to leave the socioeconomic caste they were born into. This applies to the wealthy just as well as the poor.<p>Corps with &quot;sane people&quot; running them and hiring is very rare. It&#x27;s against the rules of the game. It assumes that the people being hired are honest and aren&#x27;t gaming <i>you</i>. The reason corps have all these large walls and barb wire fencing is to prevent the 1&#x2F;1000 people who may cause political turmoil, use Title IX to their advantage, steal business plans&#x2F;tech, or otherwise act in ways harmful to the company. These cannot be predicted by &quot;good behavior&quot; because such people know the game and are acting that way.<p>Large corps that have obfuscated hiring methods do it because the fed has set up the rules in this way. Larger scope of hiring = higher chance of a destructive hire. If we want hiring to be sane then the rules have to not be punitive.

&gt; &quot;And of course, once you get one of these diamonds in the rough within your company, get ready to provide them with lots of mentorship – they’re truly a lot of work to polish, but the best of them make it all worth it.&quot;<p>This is true, they are a lot of work to polish. Overall, this hiring advice seems to apply to larger companies, where people have the time to polish these &#x27;diamonds&#x27;. I would not follow it if working in a startup.<p>I&#x27;ve naively hired &#x27;diamonds in the rough&#x27; at smaller companies and startups before. While they were &#x27;diamonds&#x27; and were very creative, often offering unique solutions to problems, they ultimately took so much effort and time to mentor that they were never able to reach their full potential. The lack of experience also meant things took longer than needed. In hindsight, my lack of time to mentor effectively was probably the issue.<p>At a smaller team, say sub 10 people, I&#x27;d be reluctant to hire a &#x27;diamond in the rough&#x27; again for that stage.

the common denominator is the author<p>makes all else moot<p>in hiring <i>at best</i> you can avoid the bad, but knowing good is always a toss up especially for high autonomy roles<p>i’ve seen good process for cookie cutter roles, but thinkers are idiosyncratic<p>outside of, “avoid dishonest people” there’s no general rule<p>and the dishonest people can look very honest

I used a very similar approach when building the security team while I was CSO at Relativity. I wrangled as much as I could with HR to do it this way. It boiled down to an initial phone call where I described the company, the job, and our process and asked if there were any questions. I did not ask the candidate any questions about their background.<p>If they expressed an interest in going further, we would share with them a work product sample tailored to the position. This included hiring a manager of compliance and a project manager.<p>The work sample test had a rigid metric and gave us a go&#x2F;no-go answer.<p>This approach was very successful.

Dig into their ability to learn. Not their education: there&#x27;s many in our industry without college degrees who excel. Not just depth, but breadth: how quickly can they pivot? The key is finding those who succeed at not being confined to a given box.

&gt; “Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. Go back to their childhood! I learn a lot about their grit and commitment to excellence from their basketball obsession or maybe their experience caring for a dying parent.<p>I actually have some great example recordings of just such interviews as described in the article if anybody wants some actionable pointers:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=TwRg5PiovHQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=TwRg5PiovHQ</a>

This is a pretty okay list of things to look for. It&#x27;s hard to actually identify people who have these traits and people who are acting like they do during interview.<p>The much more difficult issue is retaining people after you&#x27;ve trained them. I worked at a company early in my career that hired a LOT of young people. Most of them failed. A handful every year had rapid growth and would quickly be promoted.<p>But it was really common for folks to leave once they had acquired more skills. Basically they had become mid&#x2F;high experience, high potential people in 2 years and someone else would almost always pay them more to go work for them.

Oh I shouldn’t cargo cult the biggest and most dysfunctional technology companies?

FWIW my advice on the same: Hire for intellect, doesn’t have to be in the precise area you are working in. Some of the best people I’ve hired did not come from a CompSci or Informatics background. They were mostly STEM though. Hire for enthusiasm and energy. There are people who are radiators, and there are people who are drains. Don’t hire drains. Hire for the soft skills. People who can communicate. People who you _want_ to help (because they will need help at least at the start). People who are easy to work with (because little is achieved in most endeavours by a loner these days).

This reads to me like codified psychopathy. Maybe it&#x27;s profitable to assess people&#x27;s insecurities or &quot;experience caring for a dying parent&quot; when hiring, but I wouldn&#x27;t be advertising it.

Aka interviewing for culture fit.

The thing I really like about this piece is that it’s a recommendation to apply DEI to the hiring funnel, although I don’t know if the author realizes that.

&quot;excellence does not mean having 100k followers on Twitter&quot; - idk, seems like an arbitrary dismissal of what i perceive as quite an achievement

Meanwhile, on tech Twitter, you have people loudly saying the opposite: That there do not exist diamonds in the rough, that the job market is perfectly efficient, and any effort spent trying to find these diamonds is wasted: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;thdxr&#x2F;status&#x2F;1754614624446501347" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;thdxr&#x2F;status&#x2F;1754614624446501347</a>

It&#x27;s easy enough to find high-potential people. The problem is how long they&#x27;ll stay. If they stay for a couple of years, great, I&#x27;ll take it. But anything less than that, and you&#x27;re probably not recuperating the cost of hiring and training them. And the training cost can be extremely high if it involves the time of more experienced employees.

Usually the places that are trying to hire HiPos do IQ tests-once-removed like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.criteriacorp.com&#x2F;candidates&#x2F;ccat-prep" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.criteriacorp.com&#x2F;candidates&#x2F;ccat-prep</a>. There is plenty of evidence that general cognitive ability strongly correlates with job performance.

I&#x27;ve interviewed hundreds of people and participated in hiring decisions on 50 or more in various roles.<p>The conclusion I&#x27;ve reached is that it&#x27;s almost impossible to predict how someone will perform in a new role. You&#x27;re always rolling the dice. You need to be willing to hire with an open mind, and fire quickly if it&#x27;s not working out.

Hiring for potential means to me, they didn&#x27;t have the time to learn something yet. So, the most important thing is: How quickly do they learn new stuff? Are they excited about learning new stuff? You can figure this out by letting them talk about previous situations where they had to learn something new quickly.

Thank you for sharing this insightful article, it was a pleasure to read. I learned a lot about hiring low experience, high potential individuals and I appreciate the effort put into crafting this informative piece. Looking forward to implementing these strategies in the future!

If someone asked me some of these questions in an interview I would laugh it off to try to help them save face, if they persisted in seriousness I would walk out. My interviewer is neither my better nor my therapist and has no business asking about my personal life or non-work past. That’s bananas.

&quot;Tell me about&#x2F;diagram a system you understand well.&quot; Ask follow up probing questions. How well people understand systems and how the pieces fit together is how you&#x27;ll find untapped potential. It really doesn&#x27;t matter what the system is.

The title is codeword for &quot;it&#x27;s impossible to find housing in the locations where are our offices, but we still want somewhat competent people and pay them below average&quot;.

Judging by the comments here the article in question was intended to elicit a strong emotional response out of readers. A reflex that predominantly swings towards controversial.<p>It succeeded in its supposed mission.

I tick a lot of boxes and I&#x27;ve always excelled beyond expectations when hired for positions that I did not have good match on experience. Hire me! My guarantee, I&#x27;ll surprise you.

Meanwhile all the grads are on teamblind and grinding out leetcode. They know Amazon is easier to get a job at but will work you hard. They already know the system and are playing it.

Next article: How to fire high experienced, low potential people

Sidenote: how does substack get my email address? I don&#x27;t have an account with this site but they autofilled the &quot;subscribe&quot; field with my email address.

It&#x27;s always funny to see the embedded &quot;unconventional&quot; theme come up again and again. Hot take: You don&#x27;t need someone unconventional. You need someone good. Unconventional people are just the people you notice because they&#x27;re outliers, and now rather than looking for what you need - which is someone good, you&#x27;re looking for this other thing. This is particularly funny of course because this person spent 6 years working at Stripe, a company founded by a genius techie who went to MIT, dropped out, joined YC sold a company for a few million. Started a new business - Stripe, and got a load of funding from Peter Thiel. His path through life could not have been a <i>more</i> conventional story for a tech CEO.<p>So you tell me, should I be hiring you - the diamond in the rough unconventional middle manager at stripe. Or should I be hiring the absolutely conventional genius who built a billion dollar business.<p>Please, explain to me, what is it about being conventional that disqualifies someone?

&quot;How to hire low experience, high potential people&quot; who would be also okay with low compensation and great promises for the future?

Hiring low experience doesn&#x27;t make any sense because most places the salary difference is not worth the risk.<p>Its just not a good deal for an employer.

If anyone is actually interested in hiring a &quot;low experience, high potential&quot; person, I&#x27;m available.

&gt;&gt; How to hire low experience, high potential people<p>In other words interns. Wouldn&#x27;t have guessed.

&gt; How to hire low experience, high potential people<p>So basically, how to hire best for cheap.

They’re usually first year graduate students. Or fresh out of undergrad.

Great. As if age discrimination wasn&#x27;t already blatant enough.

The irony of midwits running &quot;talent acquisition&quot;

&gt;“Tell me about you. If your life was a book, give me the chapter titles from your birth till now.” Once you’ve gotten the overview, dive into each “chapter” and plumb the depths for their real stories. Go back to their childhood! I learn a lot about their grit and commitment to excellence from their basketball obsession or maybe their experience caring for a dying parent.<p>This paragraph starts bad and somehow gets worse until a spectacular crescendo of unapologetically shamefully exploitative nonsense.<p>That it&#x27;s posted in an article about techniques for interviewing 19-21 year olds makes it so much more insidious. The article in its entirity reads like a sociopath&#x27;s guide to bullying teenagers.

Or the shortcut: hire based on nepotism

I stopped reading when I saw the suggestion to avoid hiring people that are insecure. Some of the best software engineers I’ve ever hired lacked self-confidence and struggled with insecurity. In my experience, those folks tended to have extremely high standards for themselves, and did great work.<p>Conversely, some of the worst software engineers I’ve ever hired were extraordinarily adept at projecting a high level of confidence without appearing to be overconfident.

&gt; <i>It’s almost impossible to find the right inexperienced ones to do the former, who are inventive and original and yet also disciplined. They don’t have any obvious past experience that helps you figure out how special they are.</i><p>We&#x27;re still in the introduction, and already flirting with ageism. Much of HR is about actively avoiding lawsuits, not going out of your way to invite them.<p>&gt; <i>I really like questions with maximalist qualifiers like &quot;tell me about your best X.” If it&#x27;s not good, you know that their best isn&#x27;t good enough.</i><p>I really like interviewers who have a nuanced and humble understanding of the world.<p>&gt; <i>Go back to their childhood! I learn a lot about their grit and commitment to excellence from their basketball obsession or maybe their experience caring for a dying parent.</i><p>Unless the candidate had a pretty enviable childhood, or they&#x27;re already well-coached in milking a carefully-crafted origin story for college application and such... then I suspect it&#x27;s very likely that this line of questioning is either going to get you a halfhearted &quot;masking&quot; response (which might not be gritty enough for a particular interviewer), or activate a lot of associations that have little to do with the job, and quite possibly could be traumatic. An interviewer shouldn&#x27;t be a downer, nor be stumbling into psychological manipulation.<p>&gt; <i>This is one of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in the past – I found someone young, hungry, and wildly talented. However, they were also deeply insecure about their choices and prone to bouts of indecision and paralysis that crippled them.</i><p>This can happen. But there&#x27;s also an obligation to mentor, especially young people. Also, not all the rough spots are necessarily in an individual (it&#x27;s not unusual for something in the org to be the cause of problems).<p>&gt; <i>If you’re worried about negativity in the interview, know that it will only get worse over time.</i><p>I&#x27;m wondering how accurate these confident universal assertions by the writer are. (For example, maybe they&#x27;re coming out negative because an interviewer just dredged up some painful childhood experiences, see above. Or the cultist impression they&#x27;re getting from their interviewer is souring them on a company that they were excited to join.)<p>I have a few &#x27;wise truths&#x27; of my own, so I shouldn&#x27;t be too quick to judge. Reading this has reminded me that sometimes we need to explain when we say suspiciously tidy universals like that.<p>&gt; <i>Point out things that could be better about your company that could be in scope for their role — great people are excited by the challenge, not by everything being perfect.</i><p>This is related to something I like to do in interviews, which is to set a cultural tone of honesty, and to be honest about the situation and about helping find a mutual match.<p>The writer seems to be using similar appearances tactically, to elicit more information about the interviewee, to evaluate them against interviewer&#x27;s beliefs about right and wrong response.<p>&gt; <i>High EQ + Persuasion. People who have a clear-headed view of a situation, and the soft skills&#x2F;influence chops to bend the environment to their will, are especially valuable. It’s an underrated skill. What to look for: “Game recognize game” – it’s all intuition. It’s the feeling that you’re engaged and enjoying the conversation with the person, but you can see the gears moving in their heads as they read the room.</i><p>Of course the writer can&#x27;t be expected to read the room of the entire Web, to know what &quot;game recognize game&quot; isn&#x27;t going to go over well as a workplace culture with everyone.<p>As a person who scores high on &quot;intuitive&quot;, people sometimes exercise what the writer is talking about in a way that I personally find to be a turn-off. I try to get them to meet me in a genuine and honest mode, and most do. Not for us to riff together on some corporate game mode, when we&#x27;re both aware that we both know what we&#x27;re doing (there are moments, but that&#x27;s not the top mode to select for). Nor do I want them to try to manipulate&#x2F;persuade me when they think that we both <i>don&#x27;t</i> know what the other is doing (sigh, not a good sign).<p>&gt; <i>What to ask: You know it when you see it.</i><p>Out of context, this line at the end of the article isn&#x27;t entirely bad advice for an experienced and thoughtful person.

This reminds me of &quot;how to find future gems&quot; between cryptocurrency small projects, or &quot;how to analyze a good stock&quot; in the stock market of smallcap companies.<p>You can have your run book. Your check points. Your procedure and tools. Still, you&#x27;re going to hit, surprise, a 1000&#x2F;1 loss rate in the long run.<p>At least from my point of view and past experience with hiring, young, inexperienced, but looking like a good fit.<p>It&#x27;s ok to hire people with low experience, and use them like such a resource while they acquire hands-on experience (and that is not 2 months).<p>The real issue with this, is companies trying to cover experienced roles, with low experience people, from day one.<p>People without experience, won&#x27;t be able to do some things, in the same way than experienced people.<p>And those more motivated, will make serious harm to projects.<p>And those non-technical roles with decision power, listening to them (low experience) like if they were experienced, and pretending that they know the future problems of what they are doing&#x2F;talking, will increase the effect.<p>If you don&#x27;t have money to invest in the strongest, or to hire experienced people... could you then put your money on an asset with dubious results and with a high probability of causing serious issues?<p>It&#x27;s ok, then play with your few money, the careers of the rest of the team, and your startup future, in the casino. You&#x27;re of course free of doing it.<p>IMHO The same way that you don&#x27;t execute a random binary coming from a hacking forum, or a suspicious email, in the laptop of your bank accounts... you don&#x27;t try to cover roles requiring experience and results, with low experience people.<p>You do not deploy a random app, with random unsupervised code, into production, right?<p>You hire low experience people, if:<p>1) You are willing to waste time of other (more expensive) persons into teach them a lot of important things<p>2) You have experienced people willing to do that<p>3) You have procedures and projects, to isolate their harm and what they do<p>4) You have procedures, to evaluate the evolution of those persons, during the months&#x2F;years that you will be wasting the time of experienced people into teaching them those caveats that they don&#x27;t know, or that will appear by first time in their face 11 months&#x2F;years latter<p>5) You&#x27;re not going to promote them before they are ready, for example if one experienced person from the same team, leaves the company. See point 4. You promote them when they are ready. Not by other reasons.<p>Signed: a past victim of companies trying to lowcost the teams with low experience people

How could someone find a recruiter like the author?<p>I mean, I&#x27;m just starting a job-search and the top HackerNews story&#x27;s about how prospective employers ought to be looking for applications like mine! I&#x27;d love to talk to such prospective employers; I wonder how to make that connection?

Do an IQ test and a work sample test, everything else is cruft.

This is agitprop

Off the top of my head, non-exhaustive.<p>When hiring effective management, you should go with the sociopath:<p>- whose objectives align with your own<p>- who can effectively mask discomfort<p>- who can light up a room or light a fire under someone&#x27;s ass<p>- who doesn&#x27;t try to one-up you (assuming you&#x27;re hiring for a subordinate &#x2F; equal position)<p>When hiring technical talent, I think the following are important:<p>- Zeal for whatever they&#x27;re doing : This means you don&#x27;t get to employ a cookie cutter employee. Look at the technical things they do that don&#x27;t qualify for a resume.<p>- Ability to ingest information : This person you&#x27;re hiring should be comfortable with a broad intake of information from various sources. This means someone you&#x27;re hiring for a technical role should be able to tell you about (for example) the last Sci-Fi series he read and how it made him apply a certain idea from it to another domain. Doesn&#x27;t have to be too hardcore. This weeds out people that only picked a certain discipline for the money and have no real interest in it.<p>- The things they&#x27;ve made : Don&#x27;t constrain them to the exact thing you&#x27;re hiring for. Allow the candidate to veer.<p>- The things they decided to drop : This tells you what they thought wasn&#x27;t worth the effort, or what they managed to sidestep, and how. This tells you how well-developed their discernment for choosing &#x2F; dropping parts of a technical problem is. This also tells you how lazy the candidate is. Laziness is better than over-engineering something (unless, of course, you can explain why you over-engineered it (assuming the candidate ideally understands said thing is over-engineered))<p>- &quot;If you were in management, what would you do differently?&quot; - Vox Populi. Attitude towards those above him. You don&#x27;t want a one-upper in a tight-knit, integral team. Likewise, you don&#x27;t want an abrasive independent in a role that requires a lot of permission from management. Temperament must be matched to the existing team and sometimes this can be the deciding factor, an employee great at everything else but unable to work with the organization&#x27;s modus operandi might require a different management style, or concessions that your organization might not be able to provide.<p>Auxiliary characteristics for technical talent<p>- Actual impostor syndrome : most people don&#x27;t have impostor syndrome. They have the opposite, where they deep down know they&#x27;re incompetent, but their ego can&#x27;t take it, so they believe they need to calm down because they already know everything. When you find someone with actual impostor syndrome, you&#x27;ll be surprised at the stark contrast between their accomplishments and what they claim to know. They&#x27;ll be able to design complex systems but when scrutinized, will double-guess quite often. This can also be a great test for broad &#x2F; &quot;associative&quot; thinking. Obviously, this is very different from someone that&#x27;s lying on their resume and you&#x27;d need to weed out the liars in the interview. It&#x27;s fairly easy once you&#x27;ve met someone that&#x27;s the real deal.<p>- Contrarianism&#x2F;Skepticism : A healthy amount of skepticism is (IMO) necessary to keep the fires of technical work burning. Too much might mean your team would not be able to work well this candidate. More often than not, those with too much of this quality don&#x27;t apply to jobs and prefer to do their own thing. - Work Experience : Not having any shouldn&#x27;t be a deal breaker for junior positions. If they have worked in a technical position somewhere else, they should be able to explain what they did, what their contribution was and how this affected (if it did at all) the way they approach &#x2F; engage in technical work.<p>Obviously, giving these out before the interview would make detecting good hires much more difficult. It&#x27;s also important to not linger on a question. Never making a question feel mandatory is also a great way to keep the interview honest. If you&#x27;re hiring for management, make sure someone in a management position higher than the one the interview is for is alwyas present in the meeting. If you&#x27;re hiring for a technical position, make sure a senior technical person is always present and has significant input, ideally the same person &#x2F; group should invigilate through the (likely) multiple interviews. The interview should feel like a conversation and not an exam. Ten minutes of honest conversation that lays down the candidate&#x27;s technical expectations is much more valuable than five rounds of leetcode. Nevertheless, it&#x27;s important to save time and if someone doesn&#x27;t have any real interest other than money, they should be dropped.

So you&#x27;re looking for a creative, self-starting, committed, open, persuasive team-player that can go their own way and work with the team to achieve big goals. Got it. &#x2F;s<p>P.S. The &#x2F;s is sarcasm.