Season 2 - Episode 9: Peeling Back the Interview Onion
Welcome to Episode 9 of Season 2 and the first episode in our latest series “Employee Shenanigans”! Today we’re talking interviews - and specifically how tough they can be to properly evaluate candidates. We’ll share some of the hiring best practices and toughest lessons we learned.
Background Story
Dave here. It’s no secret that Chris and I struggled (a bit) to hire. We had had our culture failure and needed a new approach. The second time around we opted to focus on three key points to evaluate staff: Skills, Passion, Fit? We also decided to be as upfront as possible.
We were on the patio roof of brightlane, our coworking space at the time. It was a big open area with some picnic tables. We were interviewing a young keener who seemed interested in what we had to offer. There was a squirrel that lived in the exterior concrete walls that we had affectionately named “mangy”.
I could tell he was nervous (the candidate, not the squirrel). Two brothers, no funding, hardly customers. He was taking as much a chance on us as we were on him. So we decided to be super literal. “How do you fit into the skills-passion-fit” of our firm? A little shocked, he nailed the answer.
It was the first time we felt like we actually had a strategy for evaluating people. And it was the first of many approaches we’d add to our interview process.
Outline
Interviewing Sucks and You Probably Suck at It: As we mentioned in Episode 8 - Fighting Employment Remorse - people prepare for interviews. They become someone else, someone obsessed with your keywords and company principles, because they frankly need any job. It’s hard to interview.
How to Evaluate for Skills-Passion-Fit : These principles will be the knife that helps you chop up that onion.
Team Based Hiring Works: Don’t hire in a vacuum - bring in more of the team to evaluate your final candidates.
Busted Myths
The myth here is that you innately know how to get at the real-person. You don’t. You need methods and techniques to figure out who you’re actually interviewing. Entrepreneurs are chronically optimistic and confident in their abilities - a bad combo when evaluating someone to work at your company.
Learnings
Ok. So there’s a lot of noise in the interviewing world. Why are man-holes circular? How many gas stations are there in the US? Do you think my beard is coarse or soft? They're all desperate gambits at trying to peel back the onions of the person you’re interviewing. As we mentioned in Episode 8 - Fighting Employment Remorse - people prepare for interviews. They become someone else, someone obsessed with your keywords and company principles, because they frankly need any job.
It also turns out that hiring someone is one of the most expensive things you can do. Some estimates from scholars at Wharton Business School suggest that hiring any role costs a staggering $4,129 per job in the United States. So if you have 3 roles you’re looking to fill, the cost in time, money, and effort to recruit those folks is over $12K
Think Skills-Passion-Fit:
Skills - This is a more operational question. Can they do the thing or can they learn to do the thing. They don’t necessarily have to come in the door with all the tools, but they have to be coachable - willing to learn the skills necessary - to be part of the team
Passion - As we’ve talked about in a bunch of episodes, Passion is tricky. You can develop passion, but that’s less likely for staff (as opposed to you). We got “into” public safety, software, and sales. We weren’t sure those would be passion points we could identify in many candidates.
Fit - Oh man. This is where it gets weird. I think we had a very eclectic mix of personalities and backgrounds on our team. But the crazy thing is, it all worked. How? I think the biggest thing we used to do was group interviews - literally, it started to get a bit out of hand. But we’d have the entire company come and evaluate the candidates who made it to the last round of our interviews (we’d only have a handful of rounds for most positions).
Summary
Interviews Suck. It’s hard to figure out who the person actually is.
Hiring people is expensive.
AI can’t really do it for you, recruiters are expensive and a mixed bag.
Poor hiring means poor retention.
You need a strategy. For us, it was Skills - Passion- Fit
Data And References
Your Approach to Hiring Is All Wrong
by Peter Cappelli
Harvard Business Review - June 2019
https://hbr.org/2019/05/your-approach-to-hiring-is-all-wrong