Adding a work trial to your interview process

If you want to determine beyond a shadow of a doubt whether someone’s going to be a great hire, give them an audition project — even before having them speak to other employees on your team. I’m not talking about a generic, abstract problem. I’m talking about a real world, honest-to-God unit of work that you need done right now today on your actual... See more

An in-person interview is only one input, and not necessarily the most valuable one. Relying on my own impression of people has at times worked out okay, but I’ve found that maintaining humility about one’s own ability to see someone clearly during a one- or two-hour interview in a contrived setting is harder than I thought at first.

Whenever possible i recommend contract-to-hire for remote teams.Get them on for 1-2 weeks on a specific project. This will tell you more about them than any whiteboarding tests you will ever do.

Conventional hiring processes are designed to recruit the most skilled people to fill a specific role at the right price. The experience can feel dehumanizing — it’s laden with unwritten rules, negotiation, posturing, and indirect communication (if you’re lucky) through recruiters.

The process, at its core, is a transaction of resources. It’s not fi... See more

Here’s a quick outline of some of the things I’ve encountered: 1. Hiring T-shaped people versus specialists2. Try to get doers3. More candidate flow solves a lot of problems4. Interview for the actual work you’ll be doing, not skillset trivia5. Raw intelligence is just one factor – don’t overestimate it.

Under-index on interviews. In many cases they are just a “how good can this person talk shop” and you will just prefer native speakers from tech hubs if you do this. Get them to do real work asap.

We borrowed our hiring process from Google. Every single person that comes through the door goes through a standardized interview with at least eight people who interview them, often in pairs. There are standardized scorecards, standardized questions, all managed by an applicant-tracking system. The hiring manager has to defend each candidate like

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