“Are they smart? Can they get stuff done?… Someone who’s smart but doesn’t get stuff done should be your friend, not your employee. You can talk your problems over with them while they procrastinate on their actual job. Someone who gets stuff done but isn’t smart is inefficient: non-smart people get stuff done by doing it the hard way and working with them is slow and frustrating.”
—Aaron Swartz, on what to look for when hiring a programmer
This quote is spot-on; you should be hiring smart people no matter the position or industry. The biggest problem lies in the fact that most hiring processes are not designed in a way that facilitates hiring the best employee possible.
Or put another way: the quality of your hiring process directly correlates to the quality of employee you hire… ergo, if your hiring process is designed poorly (or not designed at all), you will hire employees that are a poor fit. (Of course you’ll occasionally get lucky, but generally you’ll get out of any effort what you put into it.)
This subject fascinates me—I’ve worked at quite a few different companies over the past two decades, and I’ve never been very impressed with any interview or hiring process I’ve been through (or conducted, for that matter). Everyone asks the same old questions (usually in the same old ways), and I’m at a complete loss for how anyone thinks this can lead to finding the right person for any given position.
Another big aspect Aaron barely touches on is whether or not your corporate culture1 and the employee’s personality are a good fit. He briefly asks “Can you work with them?”, but it’s more than that (not to mention that it’s a two-way street).
Quite possibly no one ever thinks about their hiring process, and everyone just does what everyone else does—but considering the enormous cost of hiring a new employee, both in money and time, every company should be putting more of an effort into figuring out how to hire good employees.
The thing is, most people suck at judging how well someone else will do at a particular job (or even how well they will do at a particular job)… and to even pretend you can make this judgement after reading a page or two of someone’s job history and speaking with them for two hours is ludicrous.
1. And yes, you have a corporate culture even if you’re a start-up, or a one-person shop. I’m using corporate culture as a shorthand for “the way you work”, but everywhere has a culture, even if you’re actively trying to avoid one. ↩
(via John Gruber)
