Hiring your startup’s next great employee

I&#x27;ve read some useless hiring advice posts here, but this one resets the bar. Have a nontechnical person in your technical interviews so that you can be sure at least one person on your interviewing team is human. If you&#x27;re hiring for a role and meet someone &quot;great&quot; that doesn&#x27;t work for the role, fuck it, hire them with no role, because a Jim Collins book talked about that. &quot;Ask real life questions&quot;, like they do at an interview for a retail job at Best Buy. Oh and here&#x27;s the &quot;scoring system&quot; you should use for &quot;soft no hard no&quot;.<p>Now, go forth and build an awesome company.

The advice in general is reasonably solid but this particular point is absolute madness:<p><i>Around 8 people is perfect to interview a candidate</i><p>Half that number is perfect for interviewing a candidate. You simply don&#x27;t need 8 different opinions to get a gauge on technical ability and culture fit.<p>I wouldn&#x27;t even dream of jumping through so many hoops for a job. Finding good people is difficult, adding hurdles like an intense or lengthy interview process just makes it more difficult.

&gt; Me- “Tell me about the last time you got involved in a &gt; debate on HackerNews.” &gt; &gt; Candidate- “Hmm, I don’t really talk to people online. I &gt; don’t see the value in talking to people I don’t know.’ &gt; &gt; She didn’t get the job.<p>It seems that they were interviewing for a &quot;Technical Community Manager&quot;, in which case I can see the logic behind not hiring them.<p>But if they weren&#x27;t, I wouldn&#x27;t suggest that was a &quot;hard no&quot;. A lot of people don&#x27;t get involved on social news sites, for a variety of reasons (maybe they have done in the past and don&#x27;t like being attacked by a bunch of strangers for their opinions). If they had never heard of HN, I might have to think twice, but I certainly wouldn&#x27;t rule someone out for not getting involved in &quot;debates&quot; (all too often flamewars) on social news sites.

&lt;&lt; Soft No(-2) means “Nah, there’s just something that doesn’t feel right” &lt;&lt; or “Loved her, just not for this role”<p>&lt;&lt;So remember this when hiring: the person you are interviewing may be &lt;&lt;terrible for the role, but perfect for your company. &lt;&lt;When you find that awesome person, hire them.<p>I hope there was a little bit more consistency between the rules explained here.

Leveraging your own network may mitigate some of the risks in this article.<p>&lt;&lt;&quot;Rule #1- It’s much better to say ‘no’ to the right person, than ‘yes’ to the wrong one&quot;<p>The rule #1 increases the chances of your hire to be a great person, but slows down your hiring, which may mean missed business opportunities.

This is crazy. Hire engineers that can talk to non-technical people, but then have one of these engineers interview non-technical people to make sure that non-technical people can talk to engineers? But the engineer can already talk to non-technical people, so that wouldn&#x27;t work!

It&#x27;s amazing that just about every single one of these &quot;how to hire&quot; articles presumes that the perfect employee is wandering around out there waiting to be discovered. Very, very few seem to consider that great employees are <i>developed</i>.