/Hiring

Learning To Learn

- Kevin Li tl;dr: “In the past 3 years, I’ve run over 300 interviews... I especially like capping interviews with an open-ended question that really lets great candidates shine. One of my favorite now-retired questions is: “What’s something you’ve learned that you believe gives you an edge - something that you’re almost surprised more people don’t know about?”

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How I Hire Programmers

- Aaron Swartz tl;dr: “But if I had to write down what it is that makes someone seem smart, I’d emphasize three things. First, do they know stuff? Ask them what they’ve been thinking about and probe them about it. Do they seem to understand it in detail? Second, are they curious? Do they reciprocate by asking questions about you? Are they genuinely interested or just being polite? Third, do they learn? At some point in the conversation, you’ll probably be explaining something to them. Do they actually understand it or do they just nod and smile?”

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Bug Squash: An Underrated Interview Question

- Jake Zimmerman tl;dr: The highest signal-to-noise software engineering interview I’ve seen goes like this: “Here’s a repo you’ve never seen before. Here’s how to build and run the tests in this repo. There’s a bug: what we’re observing is X, but we want to see Y instead. Find the bug and maybe even write some code to fix it.” Jake explains why he values the question. 

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An Evolutionary Approach To Staffing Software Product Teams

- Patrick Roos tl;dr: “A common pitfall that many companies face is the temptation to staff a product team quickly and from scratch with a large number of mostly external developers.” Phase (1): Lay the Foundations with a minimal team i.e. 1-3 entrepreneurial engineers and domain expert (2) Expand with precision: 1-2 engineers who match the culture and work ethic. (3) Scale through specialized feature teams. 

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How To Find Great Senior Engineers

- Ken Kantzer tl;dr: Ken finds it hard to gauge experience when hiring and has developed 3 strategies to help: (1) Case Studies: Prepare a 1-2 page story that lays out, a particular technical scenario in deliberately broad brushstrokes, and then ask the candidate to figure out what they’d do. (2) Three Why’s Technique: Practice of asking someone to describe something, and then pressing them three more times for more details. (3) Ask them to Break the Rules: A more specific instantiation of a famous interview question “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

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How I Build And Run Behavioral Interviews

- Ben Kuhn tl;dr: “I used to think that behavioral interviews were basically useless, because it was too easy for candidates to bullshit them and too hard for me to tell what was a good answer. I’d end up grading every candidate as an “okay, I guess” because I was never sure what bar I should hold them to. I still think most behavioral interviews are like that, but after grinding out way too many of them, I now think it’s possible to escape that trap. Here are my tips and tricks for doing so!”

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Add More Rigor To Your Reference Calls With These 25 Questions

tl;dr: 25 questions including: (1) How does this person compare to the best you’ve ever seen in the role? (2) On a scale of 1 - 100, how would you rank this person? (3) On a scale of 1-10, how do you rate XYZ on specific trait or ability? (4) Can you tell me about a project that would have failed without the candidate? (5) What haven’t I asked that, if you were me, you would want to know about this person?  

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How To Hire Low Experience, High Potential People

- Tara Seshan tl;dr: “After 1000+ hours of interviewing candidates, making many mistakes in hiring and firing, and closely imitating the best possible behaviors of my “hiring savant” managers, this is what I’ve learned about separating the wheat from the chaff in order to find amazing yet unconventional people.” Tara provides a guide for finding such folks. 

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How Hard Is It To Cheat In Technical Interviews With ChatGPT? We Ran An Experiment

- Michael Mroczka tl;dr: "Does ChatGPT make it easy to cheat in technical interviews? To find out, we ran an experiment where we instructed interviewees on our platform to use ChatGPT in their interviews, unbeknownst to their interviewers. The results were surprising, but as a preview, know this: companies need to change the types of interview questions they are asking — immediately."

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My Diverse Hiring Playbook

- Jacob Kaplan-Moss tl;dr: (1) Adopt a “Rooney Rule”, which requires teams to interview at least one ethnic minority candidate for senior roles. (2) Use opportunistic hires strategically. (3) Focus outbound recruiting on underrepresented candidates. (4) Focus outbound recruiting on underrepresented candidates. (5) Cultivate a network of “connectors”. (6) Be explicit that you’re looking to build diverse teams. 

featured in #484