One of the most influential book I read during my graduate studies was Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . And Others Don’t by Jim Collins.  His analogy of the Mirror and Window is a litmus test I use for leaders in the workplace.  And of course I do my best to apply it when choosing my reaction to good and bad situations.   But there is another analogy that I internalized.  I think too many teams are taking this one too far the wrong direction these days when hiring.  If you are hiring, you should review your team’s take on this analogy also!

That analogy is to get the right people on the bus.  Hire for aptitude, drive and attitude over narrowly defined existing skills.  Now I do know that startups do have budgets and can’t hire without a role in mind.  But firms evolve and their needs change.  Hiring based on a specific skill set definition leads to more scarcity for you.  It also means a larger number of talented people are filtered out of your pool.

Anecdotal Data

I’ve had the privilege of working with some great Sales Engineers and Support Engineers that had been hired right out of coding boot camps.  They had little or no prior technical experience – in fact the resume for one listed working in a bookstore as their last role.  These folks had the work ethic, desire for knowledge, discipline and concern for their team (and the firm’s customers!) that made them the best to work with.  Many were promoted (rightfully) to manager status or moved onto even more important roles after proving how good they were.  But to be honest, prior to my learning about looking for attributes over specific skills and experiences I would not have considered hiring them.  And I’ve worked for several good managers that probably would not have also.

I would argue that too many other firms are taking it too far in their search for talent.  They aren’t properly evaluating the key soft skills and core attributes.  They say “we are very selective” but in fact it is more like “too selective.”

Firms are passing on candidates for minor items like not “being all in” (super enthusiastic) during an onsite interview.  Or they are testing for skills and knowledge that can be quickly learned rather than looking for people that have a passion for growing their skills.  And of course my favorite – running a complex and heavy process that tires out talented people.

Too Long of a Marathon

This marathon hampers those candidates from shining super bright all the way through.  They have multiple opportunities and must balance their efforts and time between those that interest them.  Why test how well they can cram on the specifics of your technology?  If you don’t hire them or they don’t want to come on board there is little value to them for that time invested.  A rational person is going to limit their effort since they would be neglecting other opportunities.  (PagerDuty is one that has this process balanced and down perfect.)

In most metro areas hiring in tech is very challenging.  It is beyond there being a shortage.  Looking for an SE in the Bay Area with Machine Learning skills?  There are may be a dozen right now.  Are you going to compete with hundreds of firms to hire what could be a pure mercenary?  Or are you going to look for someone that has the passion to learn and grow that can accelerate the bus?

There is a war for talent, don’t lose it with misguided and overly heavy processes!

Quotes from Forbes

An interesting post on Forbes has a candidate questioning the recruiters need for their GPA when they have been out of grad school for 14 years and successfully employed.  The response had several sections that are applicable here.  Some of the quotes that really stood out to me include:

• “Are we collecting the data we truly need, and are we losing candidates who don’t want to deal with our pipeline?”
• “We need to wake up and recognize that recruiting is a sales and marketing function. We need to redesign our recruiting processes to focus less on screening people out and more on the candidate’s experience in the pipeline.“
• “Basically, we haven’t applied any modern business thinking to recruiting except by adding more technology and more gates to screen people out and irritate them. That’s dumb. That’s not good business.”

Perhaps I’ve been spoiled.  At Compuware, Thomas Telligman and Edna Yan had me through 6 interviews, giving an onsite technical demo in SoCal (followed that last day by negotiations and a handshake deal) in less than 10 days.  Blair Lewis and Shirin Parineh at Fastly got me though 7 interviews, including two VPs, with a written offer in under 2 weeks.  And I’ve already mentioned what a smooth process PagerDuty has put together.  For these recruiters/managers this was their way of getting things done.  And I got to work with a lot of people they placed and all were good additions to the team.

I know first hand it can be done.  If your firm is spending 6 to 8 weeks to vet a candidate your process is broken and taking too long for this economy.  There is a war for talent, don’t lose it with misguided and overly heavy processes!