Earned Lessons

Twitter Summary: A great hire will often generate lots of energy during a hiring meeting and some of it negative.

Once you have established whether a candidate passed your interview,  the final step is to have a hiring meeting where all the interviewers provide their assessment of the candidate.  The hiring meeting is important to attend in-person for multiple reasons: a) You are compelled to make a decision as you have a scheduled time and duration to decide on a candidate, b) You can confirm or provide counter-evidence for skills or behaviors people saw during their interviews, and c)  You can calibrate with your team whether you are all asking the right questions with the right degree of difficulty.  Email doesn’t work in this context as in-person dialogue allows the team to quickly clarify questions among all interviewers.

How do you decide if you are going to hire someone? The best technique I have seen to date has been requiring unanimous consensus by all the interviewers that the candidate should be hired. The tremendous flaw of this style of decision making is that it will reject candidates who could have done well at the company, but because of a sub-par interview, they are eliminated from consideration. The incredible advantage of consensus driven hiring is that everyone who is hired has had at least six people say “Yes” to hiring the candidate. If all of your colleagues have gone through the same process to join the company you should have more confidence that they are doing the right thing. If  a co-worker begins having difficulties, there should be a sense of ownership by the team that they picked the candidate for a reason and they can help them work through those issues.

It is important to note, that consensus means that everyone agrees the candidate should be hired. It does not mean that everyone likes the candidate. Some of the best employees I have ever hired had at least one or two other interviewers indicate they were not inclined to hire. There have been cases where a college intern was determined to be a great hire by two of their interviewers, and a strong no-hire, by their other two interviewers. This intern was fortunately hired and ended up being an exemplary hire for the company as the advanced and took on more projects quickly. It was fortunate that in these cases the candidate was able to express a deep technical capability and being a “superstar” in some fashion that an interviewer was willing to champion them  in the hiring meeting to take a chance on a hire. The dissenting interviewers shouldn’t ever be bullied into hiring a poor candidate, but they should be open to listening to the interviews of others and decide if it is worth the risk of sharing a payroll with the new hire.

Some of the most questionable hires have been hiring meetings where the candidate did well enough that everyone was inclined to hire, but no interviewer was able to figure out where the candidate was great.  The problem with hiring these candidates is that they frequently have a similar career within the company of doing good but not great. Finding a passion or the superlative associated with each candidate means that if they decide to join the company you will increase the overall depth of your company’s employees and the probability that something great will emerge.