Mechanize Your Hiring Process to Make Better Decisions

To fairly and evenly weed out candidates — and protect your employees’ time — Gupta also recommends assigning a take-home coding test between phone screen one and phone screen two.“This assignment should be a trivial coding problem,” he says. In the past, he’s assigned something that would take a moderately skilled coder 10 minutes to finish. “What... See more

There are two possible mistakes you can make — you can either hire the wrong person or fail to hire the right one. None of us like to say no, but you should bias toward the latter. And doing so early in the process, even with limited data, saves time for everyone, including the candidate.

You want to be very selective about the people you choose to engage with further along in your hiring process. “For every person making it all the way through the interview loop, that can be 20 person-hours,” says Gupta. “If you multiply that by your hire ratio, you’ll see that this is just not scalable. You also have to consider the candidate expe... See more

Gupta recommends assigning people already within your company to act as bar raisers. (...) “Tell them their job is to ensure that somebody is going to be above the 50% bar of the folks already at your company for that role at that level.”

So, if good intentions don’t help you reduce mistakes, what does? At Amazon, Gupta learned that the answer is mechanisms — processes that are repeatable, measurable, auditable and improvable.

“No one comes into work and says, ‘Today I’m going to push a change that’s going to break the site,’ or ‘I’m going to hire someone I know I’ll let go in six months.’ But these things happen. Good intentions don’t fill the gap between what your employees want to accomplish and all the mistakes that inevitably seem to occur.