Why We're Bad At Hiring (And How To Fix It)
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RailsConf 20152 / 94
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Group actionMultiplication signStatement (computer science)Right angleSocial classElectric generatorFunction (mathematics)Integrated development environmentDegree (graph theory)Projective planeDecision theoryNormal (geometry)Lattice (order)Dynamical systemComputer animationLecture/Conference
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:12
My name is Kerry Miller. This talk is titled, Why We're Bad at Hiring and How to Fix It. It's clearly, I'm going to tell you all about why manhole covers are round and how many golf balls fit into planes.
00:25
No, I'm actually not going to do that. For me, I've interviewed a whole bunch of people and I think that the way that we go about interviewing people is a little broken. And that's what I want to talk about. How are we hiring people? What's the process that we're passing them through and how can we improve it?
00:44
For a little bit of context, I work for Living Social, who is in fact hiring. We do most of the awesome things I'm going to talk about today. My title there is Lead Software Developer. I work primarily with heavy metal doing typecasting.
01:00
You know, we're bringing it back, old school in 2015. I figured since we print coupons basically, movable type. I'm based out of Seattle, which according to William Shatner is basically water world. Dry land is a myth. My boat. And I've been really fortunate though to get out of that rain to come down to Georgia here.
01:23
And I discovered this wonderful thing at the grocery store. That is the largest teabag in the world, I think. And I don't know if anybody notices, but it's family size. I'm trying to imagine the teacup that the family gathers around to share. Huddled in their little Georgia shack away, afraid of the tornadoes.
01:45
Yeah, so I work for Living Social. I've been there about 10 months and before that I was a teacher at Ada Developers Academy, which is a program based in Seattle that works with women who are transitioning into technology. It's a seven month educational program in the classroom, followed by a five month internship.
02:07
They just started their third cohort and they're doing really great. This isn't a pose shot. This is a picture of some students in our first cohort. I think that they figured out JavaScript in that slide and that's why I love it,
02:21
because it's very inspirational to me because they can do it and I can do it too. But part of the way that we place them in the internships is that all of the sponsoring companies come in for this one day, what we call speed interview dating, and I think it feels a little bit like this to the women. This is actually how I feel whenever I'm interviewing, no matter what side of the table I'm on.
02:44
If I'm trying to get the job or if I'm trying to hire somebody, I feel like a character out of this. Part of the problem is that interviewing, just in general, is this extremely stressful process. We have to hire somebody and I'm taking time away from my day job to go talk to somebody who may not even know Fizzbuzz.
03:03
If you're trying to get a job, you're trying to get a job. That's kind of stressful. You've got to get the monies. Interviewing itself really gives us a lot of false negatives and false positives in the form of not hiring truly great people or hiring the wrong people or people that we just end up ultimately disappointed with.
03:24
In general, this whole thing just leaves a bad taste in everybody's mouth for both sides of that table. A poor interview process suddenly poisons the environment because if we don't trust the interviewing process, then how much can we trust the people that we work with? How great are they really to start with?
03:40
We end up with the FNG problem. Are people familiar with the FNG idea? Yeah, it kind of comes out of the military. It's the FN new guy. You don't talk to that one because he's going to stay up in the land mine. Don't get to know him. He's the one who's going to get you killed so you stay away from him. In software, we tend to do that a little bit. When that new person gets hired, we kind of stay away from them a little bit.
04:01
We spend more time looking at their code because we don't really trust them. We don't trust that process that they got there. Because our process is leaving us high and dry. It's a cargo cult. Very few of us actually actively study how do we hire people, what's that process like,
04:21
until you get to the management level and then you're looking at compliance. We can't ask if you're thinking about having children or how old are you. We don't ask about those tactical questions that you should be asking to get at the things or what's that process. We just sort of say, hey, someone says, hey, Carrie, you're going to be interviewing today. And I say, oh, great. And I Google how do I interview.
04:43
And I end up with this, which is a load of malarkey. But Spolsky, Joel Spolsky wrote a very influential essay, Smart and Gets Things Done. And he turned it into a book and it's done very well for himself. And he's hired smart people who get things done. And that's worked great for him and his company.
05:00
But not every company wants to write the next Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow? And really Smart and Gets Things Done or its inverse that Steve Yegge came up with, which is done and gets things smart, both kind of miss the point. How many people here are awesome developers?
05:22
There's a few hands up. How many people here are bad developers? Yep. Just based on the numbers here. Although I think it's a little flatter. Generally, all of us fall in this bell curve. But even the worst of us, if we're working, we can do the job.
05:42
And we talk about that 10X programmer all the way over there on the right who don't exist. And certainly the tale of this doesn't exist either. So most of us are falling in this middle. And most of the people you're going to talk to in that hiring process are mediocre. So how do you figure out what kind of mediocre are they?
06:02
And it's not like we're dealing with like mega billions of dollars. Actually, is anybody like hiring for CEO roles because I am available? I don't have – my demands aren't much. You know, small seven digit – I'm sorry? Yes. Talk to me afterwards.
06:22
Damn, I said I love looking social. You might watch this. We'll not talk later, sir. But in all seriousness, when we hire for those like extremely sensitive positions like CEOs, billions of dollars on the line, how do you think that those folks do?
06:46
Forbes did this research – or excuse me, Business Week. This is stock price versus the CEO pay. There's absolutely no correlation between CEO pay and the return of the stock. I mean, there's a few outliers, but for the most part, like, you know, we're at this median point here.
07:05
And this is when there's millions and billions of dollars on the line and all these people do besides play golf is interview each other. They should figure out how to do it, right? Like what makes a good CEO? They should be figuring it out. That's their only job. One job. So I hire this guy and they can't figure it out. So how can we do it for our new startup that's like Uber for my little ponies?
07:23
Like how do we do that? How do we do that? Well, it turns out that if you start Googling around, you're going to find a lot of advice, a lot of it's bad. But the good advice boils down to really basically three points. Know what you're looking for, find the people who have it, and then improve your process.
07:49
So what are you looking for? Well, that depends on you and where you work. I've been a manager of a number of teams and the best metaphor that I've ever come up with
08:00
for thinking about my team is a closed ecosystem, or really like a small mountain valley somewhere. And we have wolves and we have rabbits and there are insects and worms and trees, but it's a balanced ecosystem. And as soon as I hire somebody else or somebody leaves, I'm removing something from that ecosystem.
08:23
So something has to change. The famous story of Hawaii being overrun with rats that came off of the early European ships that came there. And they're like, I know what we'll do, we'll release some snakes and the snakes will eat all the rats, right? That's a great idea because there's no snakes in Hawaii, it's an island.
08:43
Well, now you've got snakes. And the snakes eat the birds and that's kind of bad too, so now you have to release mongoose and you're kind of like this constant cycle of always chasing your tail with your ecosystem. So you have to kind of understand that each additional person has a certain percentage weight that they're going to do.
09:05
Someone was telling me that they work for a company of 30 people. So hiring any one person, that person is now one three percent. They're now three percent of the company, right? So that change, that's going to have this really noticeable impact. If you're on a team, maybe you're in a big company though, you think, oh, any one person is going to change it.
09:24
But if you've got eight people on your team, you hire one more. That person is now one ninth of your culture. That's going to be a huge change. If you lose a person, you've lost an eighth of your culture. Well, you can get around that by hiring people exactly like you, right?
09:41
Treat us all as the same and sort of like plug us in as spare parts. But that just clones ourselves into a monoculture. And the problem with monocultures is diseases come along and they die. Do you all know about the monoculture in bananas? No. Okay. Well, I'm going to tell you about bananas. What can I talk about, you know, ecosystems and ecology?
10:03
Bananas are a monoculture. They are all genetic clones of each other. And the interesting thing about bananas is you may be familiar with the idea that bananas are slippery. Bananas aren't actually all that slippery. If you actually like get a banana peel and step on it, it doesn't really slide. So why did that joke come around?
10:21
Well, it's because it's a monoculture. The bananas we eat today are not the bananas that our parents ate. And those bananas that our parents ate were not the bananas that their parents ate. Because what happened is every 20 or 30 years a massive blight comes around, destroys the entire banana crop. Entire countries have been devastated in Central America. Their entire economy is wiped out because all of a sudden in a matter of like five years all the banana fields die.
10:47
Similarly on teens, if we're all alike, if we're all a monoculture, memes come around. These ideas that we have about the right way to do software development, the right tools to use, if we're not bringing in fresh ideas, fresh diversity of thought, we can fall prey to those idea diseases.
11:07
So there's been a lot of talk the last couple of years, though, about diversifying, especially in terms of culture. But in order to understand what different is, you have to understand who you are to begin with. So you have to start to define your culture.
11:21
Which takes a lot of work, but it's really worth it. You have to start before you even start hiring. You have to know what you're going to do. You can't just do this on like a Tuesday because you're going to have candidates in on Wednesday. It should be something, especially if you're a team lead, you should be working on constantly questioning and defining it. Now, a lot of people know that I went to a hippie school.
11:44
I have a professional hippie degree and being a hippie. That's why I don't have any shoes on right now, among other reasons. But one of the things we do there, we work in like small groups to study things rather than a classroom. It's group discussion, dynamics, working on group projects.
12:01
And we work on this idea of generating belief therefore statements, that first day of class. And so we say something like, we believe in respect. Well, what does respect mean? Right, so we say, we believe in respect, therefore we will show up in time for all meetings. The idea is, we want to say, we all have this vague idea.
12:23
So let's say our idea is, let's be professional to each other. We're all professionals and we treat each other with respect. Well, maybe you came out of a very rigorous academic environment where aggressive questioning of somebody else's output is the norm, right?
12:40
And you think that's treating me with respect to constantly question what I do in my decisions. I just think you're an asshole. Right, so what are these abstract ideas that we have about who we are, that we're friendly, that we're open, that we're honest with each other? Generating therefore statements gives us actual tangible things that we can measure, things that
13:01
we can look at and say, yes, this is what this vagueness looks like. And I know that this is, some of you are thinking that it's kind of a waste of time. This idea that we need to sit around and hold hands and have a meeting and talk about our feelings.
13:21
And it does take time and effort, but if you want to have an ecosystem of a team or a company that can really grow and thrive and treat individuals well and be a place that people are happy to come to work and are happy to recommend other people to and are invested and enthusiastic about the product that you're building or the services you're providing,
13:42
you have to create this kind of environment. Finding people who have it. Once you figure out actually who you want, not just the skills that you actually need. Right, that list of like, well, I must have five years of experience or an equivalent BA or vice versa.
14:02
I have to know Java, C++, must be DHH. And I also have to show up on time for meetings. You've got to kind of find them. And I assume that this is, I think it's fair to assume this is a hiring process that most of you have gone through at some point in your career.
14:21
Even if you're just starting out, even if you're transferring in from another thing, you've kind of probably gone through this process. Anyone not ever gone through this typical process? Okay, one person, there's always one person and it's always the same person. Hiring, this hiring process though is there for a reason, right?
14:40
Nobody ever invents anything or does something without a really good reason that is perfectly finely tuned for the environment they're in, right? Someone came up with this idea of here's the hiring process because we don't have time to interview every single person who wants to come and work for us. We simply don't. So we need to filter down to just the most likely candidates.
15:01
So you can think of each step of your hiring process as a filter. And then consider what that filter allows in and what it rejects. So, for example, if I insist that you have a GitHub profile and an actual like open source contributor status, well, now I'm rejecting everybody who doesn't have spare time.
15:24
Or people who might have kids, you know, who just don't have time on the weekends or evenings to do open source. Or maybe they have a security clearance that doesn't allow them to share any code whatsoever, even obfuscated code samples. Maybe your recruiters in HR department are requiring people to submit things in Word.
15:40
That's my favorite, right? Could you send me a doc of your resume? My trick with that, personally, I just export my LinkedIn profile. I don't actually have a resume. Phone screens are tricky. Like what if the person has what you might consider a funny accent or doesn't have English as a first language?
16:01
So the phone screen is difficult, right? You've biased yourself against that. So understanding each of these steps, what they reject and what they allow through can help you make sure that you're getting the actual candidates that you want at the interview time. Because that's what it's all about.
16:20
I heard one giggle. Come on, I got to get more than that for this. I love this photo. I originally found this photo. I searched for like interview day in Google image search and for whatever reason this came up. I'm like, what the? So I click through and it was just an image, like on an imager page. I was like, click here for more information. I'm like, no.
16:43
I want no context for this image ever. Interview day is really like the critical high touch point. And so that's what I'm going to talk about most today, right? That actual like face to face interaction you're going to have. Communicating the schedule to the person coming in is super important.
17:03
I go to a lot of interviews or I have in my life where they say, yeah, 10 a.m. And they're like, I don't know, is it going to be like two hours or eight hours or is it a three day process? Communicating that process up front and setting those expectations. Please bring a laptop candidate or don't bring a laptop.
17:20
We'll be going to lunch or not going to lunch. So that the candidate like has some like comfort that there's a structure and a plan here. That kind of stuff is really professional and it sets a really nice tone. It can be friendly. It doesn't have to be stayed, you know, and like kind of buttoned down. But just like it shows confidence in your process. And that generates that confidence in the part of the person who's being interviewed.
17:43
And they're more likely to like be happier and more relaxed. You should always have a diverse set of interviewers. Not just visible minorities but also invisible minorities if you can. And allow for breaks in your schedule for the day.
18:04
Right around the fourth hour and the fifth cup of coffee, like I really want to run to the bathroom. And make sure that you've got time in between for the candidate to do those sorts of things. For the candidate to also say like, oh, yeah, I've got to make a call. So they can call and say, nope, sorry, I'm still sick, boss. Yeah, I can't come in today.
18:23
And part of this also is having this game plan. I like to split up the interview. So say we're hiring for a Rails developer, right? And that involves a little bit of front end, some JavaScript, some back end, a little database knowledge. I try to split that up and assign interviewers to specific areas of focus, right?
18:43
They might be pairing on something for an hour or two but like, hey, Mike, could you focus on how well the candidate knows SQL? Or, hey, Joe, could you work on how well they know JavaScript? That makes sure that you're getting really good coverage and you're getting good interactions without like someone asking the same three to five questions over and over and over again.
19:04
Because that's kind of ridiculous. And then just having like those breaks in between interviewers so that you can hand off the interview to the next person. There's nothing worse than like, okay, so you wrap up with that first person in the interview loop and they're like, okay, well, I'm going to go get Joe and he'll be your next interviewer.
19:24
And then as a candidate you sit there and it's a little uncomfortable and you sit there for like 20 minutes and like, have they forgotten about me? What's going on? It turns out like, oh, no, Joe forgot and he went out to coffee. Or there's a fire, you know, and the server's melting down.
19:41
There's always a fire every interview I go to, right? And they're like, oh, man, I'm sorry, I'm so unorganized, you know. But really like respect the interview process, again, because it shows that confidence in that process and it kind of transmit out not just to the candidate but to other people in the company that like we have a good process, we believe in it. It should be an enjoyable thing for everybody.
20:03
And that handoff lets me go to the next person and say, oh, Joe, hey, listen, I know I was supposed to talk about data structures with Alice but, you know, I didn't get enough signal on that. I didn't get enough information about what we need. So, could you ask this question? And every interviewer should have like a standard three to five questions
20:22
that they're going to ask on the topic that, you know, they've chosen or has been assigned to them. So, you can compare apples to apples across candidates, you know. So, you have like a less biased interaction to sort of look at. Usually, I've almost always been the hiring manager or someone running that process.
20:43
I really like to be like the first person to like just settle them in, have a casual conversation. Hey, how did you get here today? Do you have everything? Kind of shoot the breeze. I might double check if there's any red flags that came up between phone screen and getting the person in. So, like, hey, we did it.
21:00
That university doesn't exist. You see, it says you have a computer science degree from Columbia but we called them. Oh, the country Columbia, okay. It also gives me a chance to learn how this person communicates. So, maybe English isn't their first language and I might want to let people know.
21:23
Just like, hey, you know, be a little more forgiving with those sorts of things. Or maybe they have a hearing or speech impediment. I just want to pass that along, you know, like to somebody like maybe you can enunciate more, all sorts of things. To the other interviewers, right.
21:41
And that just sort of like sets it up, everybody, for making it a smooth process. This is usually the point, behavioral interviewing as well, where we start asking like those hypothetical gameable questions. For example, how would you handle conflict with a coworker? Oh, well, of course, you know, I went to HR and we sat down.
22:02
We had some mediation and we, you know, we kind of worked it out. We learned some boundaries and like, yeah, that's what everybody says, right. Have you ever been in an interview and had the person say like, oh, well, this one guy, let me tell you. So, then I super glued things together, you know, and I like spiked his chair and then I punched him.
22:21
It was a bad scene. That's why I'm looking for work. That's what we call an HR red alert. That has actually happened to me once. Like, yeah, some guy just came in and just told this horror story of like cold cocking his boss and that's why he was looking for work. And I was like, well, maybe he deserved it. I don't know, right. But by the same token, right, like the question I'm asking is one that everyone knows what the answer is when you're asked.
22:47
Well, how would you handle a salesperson coming in asking for a feature at the last minute? It's a rush job. The answer should be, well, I go to my boss and, you know, I work out the schedule and see how it's important. You know, no one's ever going to say, oh, I tell him I'll do it and I don't do it.
23:03
Because people want to get hired and they know what the game is. They know what the game is. And this is just like puzzle questions in a way. I don't like, I come from a theater background. I did a, I'd say my degree is in, but I didn't actually get the degree, so I've got, you know, degree work in performance production.
23:23
I've been on stage quite a bit. And I like to think of the interview process as an audition. So what I want to be doing is I want to be seeing how does this person actually perform. Not just what do they think, but how do they actually do the work. So I usually start out with one person doing a collaboration audition where instead of normal whiteboarding,
23:44
let's just plan an app, let's look at the high level. What are your considerations? Not do you know FizzBuzz or do you understand recursion, but do you understand how sockets work? Do you understand how HTTP communication cycles go? Do you understand what JSON is?
24:01
That sort of stuff comes out really highly when we start just like planning out a system. How would we start a new project? Pairing auditions, in the Ruby community we do a lot of pairing auditions as part of our interviewing process. Not everybody does though. And not everybody pairs in their day to day. So it can be really uncomfortable and weird for a candidate.
24:21
So let them know upfront if that's something you're going to be doing. And by all means, tell them to bring a laptop and let them use their laptop. Because there's nothing worse than being forced to use somebody else's laptop with Vim on it when you're me and you don't know Vim or you only know how to quit. I should get that tattooed actually somewhere.
24:41
That would be a great tattoo. Right, that's kind of so bad. So if they're an Emacs user, like don't say shit about Vim. Just let them use whatever. It doesn't really matter. What you're looking for is you can ask them about why they chose a particular tool and maybe it's because they don't know about Vim. You know, it happens. Maybe they tried Vim but they just don't like it because their favorite tool is built into bbedit or whatever.
25:06
So let them do it. If you're doing a code sample as part of the interview or a little tiny code project, use that as the basis for your pairing. Talk about refactoring that. Say, hey, we'll work on that.
25:21
Give them feedback. See how they handle collaboration and feedback. Are they defensive? Are they not? Are they accepting? Can you bounce ideas off of them? Do those things fit in with what you and your company are looking for? I also do presentation auditions. I find that communication skills are super, super important,
25:42
even for the shyest, most introverted among us. We have to communicate with people. Some of us do it verbally. Almost all of us do it constantly all day long in our writing. Code is communication, email as well. So I like to have candidates actually teach me something.
26:01
Google used to do this in the early days, but they would spring it on people. Sergey would say like, okay, I'm going to leave the room for five minutes and then I come back and teach me something I don't know. That's a lot of pressure. We did this at Amazon as well. It actually works really, really well, but I think it's a little bit of kind of a surprise. You're on stage.
26:21
So I usually tell people ahead of time when they come in that that's going to be part of their process. I tell them basically do a lightning talk. Teach me something I don't know. It doesn't have to be technical. I've had people teach me how to build aquariums. One guy taught me how to paint his house, like specifically his house. He had photos of it and everything. He might have been trying to recruit me for some weekend work.
26:42
I don't know. But basically like look at how can they communicate ideas to somebody who may not have the full context or background of knowledge. Do they use a lot of technical terms without checking with you? Do they dive right in? Do they kind of like take stock of where you are in relation to painting, for example?
27:02
How do they do that? It doesn't have to be a lightning talk presentation. It could also be like maybe like do a written blog post for us, you know, just like a written sample. You can kind of negotiate this with the candidate themselves. Again, you're looking for communication and how well they're doing that.
27:20
Oh, and make sure you tell them like not to prepare ahead of time because you don't want someone spending like eight hours building like a five-minute presentation that like no one is ever going to see, right? So just like let them know like we don't expect a huge, you know, dog and pony show. A note on the interviewing lunch which is super popular. I like food.
27:40
I like food. If you want to buy me a free lunch, that would be wonderful. But if you do take the candidate to lunch, make sure, again, tell them up front and make sure that you pay and tell them that you're going to pay because there's nothing worse than maybe that person is really unemployed and doesn't have the funds to go to the fancy, you know, the fancy grass-fed organic burger shack.
28:05
Maybe they can't go there. So don't let a person's ability to pay for this fancy lunch get in the way. Most companies – I've only once had a company expect me to pay for my own lunch at one of these things. That was a little awkward. Try not to overwhelm the candidate.
28:22
I mean a lot of times like we go out with like a group of four or five to the interview lunch. I one time went to an interview lunch with nine people from the company. I actually have a little bit of hearing loss which is nice because I can actually hear you all like laugh a little bit. If you want to do it more, that would be awesome.
28:43
So I have a really hard time in like loud bars and parties, especially here at the conference, you know, like I'll come and say hi but I have a really hard time with that. The audio is off. So at a long table, I can't talk to people more than like one or two seats away from me simply because I can't hear them. I can't hear them clearly.
29:01
I can just, hmm, yeah, nice, like, hi. You know, that's about the most I can do. So why did we go to lunch with nine people? You know, like I talked to like the two people around me and everyone else just talked about their job. You know, they didn't get a chance to meet me. They just got in on a free lunch. So keep that like a small intimate sort of thing and relax and casual. Remember that the candidate is still being interviewed and they're aware of it.
29:23
They're still on their like best, what my mom would call a guest behavior. They're going to mind their piece and cues. It's not as relaxed and culture-fidy as we might think but it is a little bit just a different venue for communicating with them and seeing how they go. Avoid bars.
29:40
Avoid alcohol for this. Not everybody drinks. And if you don't want to communicate that you have to drink in order to be part of, to get this job, I think it's pretty horrible. Pick some place that's nice but not too nice. You know, not too seedy, not too rundown, but not super fancy. And again, let the candidate know because they might have rented like a nice tuxedo to come to the thing
30:00
and now you're asking them to eat soup. Like, that's just dangerous. Anyway, this is a good time to like talk about hobbies and passions and things that you do that aren't work but inform what you do. And remember through all of this that the person wants to get the job and they're really nervous and they're on stage basically in front of you performing.
30:24
And that is really, really hard. It is really, really hard. And you don't want to make fun of somebody. You know, somebody who's just bad at their job. Because maybe they're having, maybe they're having one bad day or maybe your one interviewer is having a bad day.
30:42
I mean, it takes a few like examples of this not being good to really like cement that like this is not the right candidate for us. I can't help it. This is Raul Ibanez, a professional baseball player who was once famously quoted in that he takes pride in his defense.
31:03
He was rated the worst defender in all of baseball. And he played left field for the Mariners, which is a very defensive position. So just be aware that like, you know, you can't... You want to see more of him? Go back?
31:22
This is my favorite when he just like runs on the wall. Oh, geez. Anyway, the point here though is that we're not all bad like Raul, right? Like, we might blow one piece of the interview. For example, I always forget the difference between left outer and right inner joins.
31:42
I guess they're probably the same thing. I don't know, right? But if I biff that, like, should I get completely flushed out of the interview process because I got nervous, you know? Or maybe, you know, like if I had a kid, maybe my kid is sick and so I'm off on that interview day. So kind of take those things into account when you can. After the interview, your portion of the interview is over.
32:02
You go back to your desk. Don't go back to work. Write down your impressions of the candidate right then. Write down yes or no. I would hire this person or not hire them. But then, what would change your mind? So if you saw Raul Ibanez totally biff that play,
32:23
what would change your mind about him being a good defender or a bad defender? Well, in the mind of Mariners management, the fact that he hit 20, 30 home runs a year, that was good enough, you know? But if you didn't know that, if you were just trying to evaluate this baseball player, you would say, wow, he's pretty inept. Why does he have a professional contract? And I don't because that looks easy. I could do that.
32:42
So what would change your mind about that candidate, right? If you absolutely had to hire somebody who knew RAC, for example, what would change your mind? Finding out they're on the RAC core team? Maybe that's how much it is. Maybe they're just not communicating well with you. So figure that out ahead of time. Then when you get to that group feedback position where you discuss the candidate,
33:04
maybe somebody says something like that. You say, yeah, I really liked your work on RAC. It's been amazing and it's been really stunning. Wow, like I guess maybe I was wrong. So questioning your own beliefs and your biases as you come in as an individual, it helps de-bias your team as well.
33:24
This can sometimes lead to follow-up interviews when you have like interviewers who are kind of conflicted about whether or not a candidate is good on something. It can be a little problematic because you're asking a person to take another sick day off from work to come in. And so just be careful. Try not to do them if you can avoid it.
33:42
And really set up the candidate's expectations for what's going to happen. It's so simple to create like a calendar reminder, right? So tell the candidate, okay, we interviewed on Monday. I will let you know by Thursday 3 p.m. And just go back to your desk and set that as a reminder. You don't have to have a decision by Thursday 3 p.m.
34:01
But you for damn sure better tell them, hey, I'm really sorry. We don't have an answer for you yet, but we will have an answer for you on Monday. Because so many candidates and so many interview processes or you go in, you interview, right, and they're like, great, that was awesome. We're really excited. We'll let you know. And then you hear nothing forever. And you have to email them or call them a couple of times.
34:21
People have had this experience, a few people. I see some nodding. I see a lot of nodding actually. That is a really horrible experience and no one wants to be put there. Be professional about it. Unfortunately, you can't hire everybody. Not every brony is going to get hired.
34:40
Don't make it personal. You don't need to call anything out in that rejection. But be respectful about it. Try not to say we wish you good luck in your future endeavors. That's like the F.U. of the interview process, right? And if you have a reapplication process, explain it. I know so many people who work for Google now
35:01
who did not get in on their first try, and some of them didn't even get in on their second try, but Google let them know, said, hey, you can reapply in end months. We would really love to see if you could improve your knowledge about data structures or whatever it is, right, that you feel like the candidate is lacking. If the candidate asks you for feedback, I think you should give it.
35:23
I think you should give it. And if you've gone through this process where you're documenting what your expectations are and how you could change your mind, this is something you can give to them in a non-actionable way. If you just rejected people and you can't give them a reason, there's something wrong in your process, which you should keep improving.
35:49
And, you know, we improve what we measure. So ahead of time, write down whether or not you think that you will accept this candidate. It doesn't have to be any sort of scale.
36:00
It's not a big thing to take into account. But just trying to unravel your own personal biases. Somebody worked at Microsoft for 10 years. I don't think I want to hire them. But I get in there and I find out, no, they're really, really good. They're not a Microsoft person, you know. Maybe they worked at Microsoft because they needed the health insurance for their ailing mother. You don't know. But maybe I'm biased against Microsoft and I can discover that
36:23
and kind of unpack that a little bit. And, you know, we live in this hyper-connected age of LinkedIn and Twitter and everything. It pays to kind of like check in on people that you turn down. How many false negatives are we getting? If we don't hire somebody because we're like, yeah, they just really don't know SQL.
36:42
That's no good. But then they turn up on like the Postgres project doing like amazing stuff. Like you should find that out. Like where did your process let you down? I'm getting close to the end, but I want to rip through seven interview anti-patterns that people still to this day do.
37:02
Anything having to do with your college transcripts. Unless the candidate has almost no experience, GPA is useless. It's really only indicative for a couple of years out of college about performance. It's really geared for judging academia. And this is also the conflict between people with programming experience versus CS education.
37:21
They're not as interchangeable as we think. And if any, you should never ask for high school transcripts. I actually didn't get a job because I didn't graduate from high school. I'm like, 37? I was 37 then. Really? I went to college even. Well, I dropped out of college, but you know, like,
37:42
I'm probably going to leave your company in two or three years anyway. Like I'm just going to follow that pattern. What does it matter? Negging. Do not do this. Especially this last one. I read an article in Forbes where the CEO is one cool trick to hiring. He's like, I just looked that person in the eye and I say, I don't see the spark. Convince me.
38:05
Right? Like I don't want to work for that guy. He's like, oh, well, nine out of ten people don't, you know, they kind of walk away with their tail between the legs, but it's that tenth person that I hire and they've got it. I'm like, no, they're a bootlicker. You don't want that person. Right? This is also an open invitation to a sexual harassment lawsuit.
38:23
Right? You have a position of power over this person and you're asking them for a vague convince me. That's really smart of me and shitty. Don't do it. I don't like to submit a pull request to apply. There are well documented barriers to open source software and we're asking people to do free work in exchange for,
38:43
like, the opportunity to interview. Right? That's just horrible. There's a big rails consulting shop that actually hires you on a contractor contract, I guess, for a week. And that's their interview. They pair with you for a week to do that. But they pay you for it. They fly you out to wherever the office is
39:01
and they pay you to work there. I think that's brilliant. No free work. Don't do group and speed interviews. We did that at the first cohort of ADA. I would never, ever, ever do it again. It's hard to wrangle so many candidates and companies.
39:21
We went with the best that we thought at the time. But I'd love to find a better way to do it. I don't like speed dating things. They're kind of crappy. Puzzle questions. A lot of people still do these. I got asked, like, you know, about five trains all converging in New York. And I'm like, I don't know anything about New York. I'm from the West Coast. Like, what do I know about trains?
39:40
Google doesn't do puzzle questions anymore. They have enough interviews and they've done these for a long enough time that they're able to create a longitudinal analysis of it and say, like, your ability to perform a puzzle question has no bearing on your success at Google. Microsoft has stopped doing this. Amazon. All the big companies that are famous for doing these have stopped doing them. You should stop doing them, too. All they do is make you feel cool that you know the secret trick.
40:02
You know, they're like the blacksmith puzzles and things like that. I hate whiteboard coding. I refuse to do it. It's super artificial. I can't look anything up. And it's a lean-back experience for everybody, right? The person who's doing the interviewing is leaning back and judging instead of collaborating and working with that person.
40:21
And you want to find those things out, not how well have they memorized standard lib and can they write. Also, it is biased against left-handed people. Writing at a whiteboard when you're left-handed is horrible because you're rubbing your sleeve across the whiteboard. Also, most companies don't stock left-handed dry erase markers. So it's kind of a nightmare.
40:44
Don't do FizzBuzz. Can we stop FizzBuzz? I own FizzBuzz.io. Plug. Yeah, FizzBuzz is a service. Why not? But seriously, all you're really filtering for with this is do they know modulus? Do they know the secret trick?
41:01
And you don't want to be filtering people for knowing secret tricks. You're building a superhero team. That's what you're doing, right? And we know that we need Superman and we need Wonder Woman. And sometimes we need Aquaman.
41:23
Sometimes. So do we need a second Aquaman? I mean, we already do a lot with like ponds and inlets and bays. Do we need a second Aquaman? Do we need to be nothing more than a whole bunch of people in red capes that fly around? Do we need a Batman with gadgets to kind of get around the kryptonite?
41:42
You need to set up your interviewing process so that you find the right fit. And the right fit in terms of skills and personality comes when you actually understand what it is you're looking for. And then you design a process that matches that, that filters for those things. Just like gold panning machines that tumble rocks and then tumble the gravel
42:03
and tumble the dirt and tumble the silt to get the gold out. Each step of that is a highly tuned piece of machinery and science and physics to extract gold. And your process needs to be just like that. Filtering down to catch those little particles of gold, those little tiny individuals who are going to surprise you and just be amazing superstars.
42:23
I don't know if I want to hire this guy if he showed up at an interview just like that. But maybe I do. Maybe he's the best person for the job. And I'm never going to know unless I know what I'm looking for. That's me. That's my talk.
42:42
I can be found pretty much everywhere. I'm curious. I have stickers just like Aaron. I don't have enough ponies, so if you have more ponies, I gladly accept them. They will not influence my hiring decision, I promise. Thank you.