Every technology companies’ hiring process has bugs. Not software glitches, but human error, flaw, failure, and fault that causes it to behave in unintended ways.
Hiring practices include only reviewing candidates that attended a small list of schools. An incredibly talented engineer is skipped because his school isn’t recognized by your hiring manager.
An interviewer couldn’t articulate it exactly, but felt the candidate wasn’t a fit for the company culture. The interviewee was a great match for the role, but the opposite personality type of the interviewer, someone from a different team.
A star candidate becomes less interested in working on your team when they realize they are the only person in the company who is not like everyone else. Your hiring manager assumes the candidate took another role (but doesn’t ask) for other reasons and moves on to their second choice.
Leadership insisted the ‘big job’ go to a candidate that came from a big company. The hire had only worked on large teams, experience that had little use within the small company where they were hired. High salary paid, recruiter compensated, and an employee who left after 12 months.
The hardest thing about bugs isn’t the error they throw, it’s finding them in the first place. Only companies who invest time in running QA on their hiring process will build the innovative teams they want. That of course requires knowing what you want in the first place.
Having a hiring process is important, almost as important as remembering that it’s all based on the bias of the people who built it.
If you have something to share, drop a line in the comments or send me a line on Twitter.
Working with the USV portfolio means I get to meet a lot of outstanding candidates looking to join one of our portfolio companies. Here are a few characteristics I’ve found to distinguish the great candidates:
Curious
You need to be curious to create things that never existed. You don’t necessarily have to be curious about something related to the job you’re taking on, but you have to have curiosity for something.
What do you love? If you can’t think of anything, it will be hard to build a product out of love. You have to understand it to get better at building it.
Show Hustle
Now, this is not just, “I got one ‘no’ so I’m going to give up.” That’s persistence, but hustle is more that that. Do your research, put your heart into it, cater to that company that has an open position, then don’t stop at one “no”. Understand what they need and work to become the person the company needs.
This is not, let me send my cookie cutter resume to every startup (even when they’re not hiring). Do the work to understand what you’re applying to and why it would be a good fit. There are other candidates doing this, some with outstanding backgrounds too. Don’t get lazy where it’s important. Do the work.
Be Smart
Being smart is beyond just intelligence, it’s working to raise your knowledge, not just what you’ve been given. Logic works. Learning works. Do your research. What don’t you know? What aren’t you good at? Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, understand your own. Then be smart enough to push to the edge of your potential. See what exists there.
Level Up
Become a mechanic. Understand the what, how, who. You don’t need to know everything but you should be excited enough about your industry that you want to know as much as possible. If you want to work as a Product Manager, learn SQL. If you want to work on Design, learn Javascript. If you want to understand social media, start with a side project just focused on promotion. Be hungry for more. If you’re not hungry in the beginning, it’s a long road.
This is why people preach about passion. If you don’t have an interest about something, a let me wake up first thing in the morning and read the news on this topic - then look in a different industry. Every day, ever dinner party, every taxi driver (in SF or Chicago) will want to know what you do. If you aren’t excited about talking about it, keep on moving.
Care
Love to solve problems? Think scaling is challenging? Be excited about that, the thing you do on the day to day. Love talking to people, maybe sales, or customer support. The industry doesn’t matter as much as the mission of the company does. Find what moves you. Serve that purpose in what you do and the mission the company solves.
- Kickstarter, VHX, Soundcloud, Shapeways, Wattapd and Splice empower creators.
- Meetup believes people should build offline communities just like they do online.
- CircleUp, LendingClub, Funding Circle, Coinbase and Dwolla are revolutionizing the way money and banking exist.
- Firebase, Twilio, MongoDB, CloudFlare and Sift Science are creating the best tools to empower developers.
If you have any additions or questions, happy to discuss in the comments.
(Thanks to RunofPlay for the image, with timely football theme.)
The single most important thing to the USV Network is the people who comprise the 50+ companies.There is so much value built within a single team that is only further amplified when those teams get to work with peers one degree away. The knowledge base expands beyond just USV companies because each person in the network brings the expertise from their current company and every company they’ve worked at prior.
We got a snapshot into Amazon’s ‘Bar Raiser’ method during a discussion on hiring great product managers. Thanks to Douglas Hwang, Product Manager at Etsy, who shared a few insights from his time at Amazon. [Disclaimer: These are my notes from the discussion–not straight from the source.]
A core requirement of the Bar Raiser method seems to require internalizing this core idea:
“It is better to accidentally say no to good people than accidentally say yes to bad people.”
Now, this seems easy in principle, but can come under a lot of pressure in a fast growing company. You need an iOS engineer yesterday and your current team is already working through the weekends. Yes, Jason Fried’s Rework said “Hire when it hurts”, but this is beyond that. No, this is still not a good reason to hire an okay candidate.
Let’s look at it this way, hiring a bad candidate comes at a huge cost and hiring the best candidate is the least cost. So what resources are wasted?
- Money: compensation, new setup of accounts, desk space, equipment, free lunches, etc.
- Time: HR’s time on-boarding, interviewers time, team’s time getting them up to speed, manager’s time of training.
- Morale: Team’s disappointment, lowering the bar of quality, loss of faith it will get done.
Now all of these aren’t deal-breakers, as you grow, you will make bad hires. But the hit to resources will need to be compensated in other ways so just realize you’ll need to overcompensate for morale after a bad hire leaves.
The bar raiser method helps your team be more efficient at the top of funnel (candidates coming in) so that less time gets wasted with bringing on weaker hires.
The hiring process at Amazon can consist up to (and sometimes more) of 7 interviews conducted by 7 different people, with two key decision makers. The first is the Hiring Manager; she will be adding this candidate to her team so she is ultimately responsible for evaluating the candidate for their ability to get the work done. The second key decision maker is the Bar Raiser; who is from a different team and won’t be working directly with the candidate but is responsible for making sure “this person is raising the talent bar at Amazon.” Both decision makers must say ‘yes’ for a candidate to get hired.
The Bar Raiser has an important stake in bringing up the level of talent at the company, which removes a hiring manager’s bias to move quickly to fill a role directly on their team. This method may eliminate candidates who were a fit for the role but wouldn’t find a long-term home in the company.
Does your company have a set method it uses for more efficient hiring?
I’m interested to learn more of what’s worked or hasn’t and at what company size.
In the tech community there has been a lot of talk about diversity, gender ratios and the trouble with homogenous perspectives. Equality is always a worthy topic and should be a constant topic until we find it.
The challenge with reading a lot about these issues is that they teach us more about what not to do than how to encourage the right things.
How do you empower all employees to be part of the solution, not just police bad behavior?
When you’re growing your company, you need to find people with the skills where you have holes. That requires you to seek out people unlike the current people on your team. Diversity makes sense.
I’ve heard more conversations about how to be mindful about diversity as an organization grows. One common question is, how do you take action and empower all of your employees to participate? The answer is different for every company but the best place to start is by taking inventory of what’s currently happening:
- Do you consider your team diverse or homogenous (diversity goes beyond the physical, it’s background, education, experience: work or worldly, viewpoints, and beyond)?
- Is there someone currently taking the lead on ensuring there is diversity on the team?
- Has this person become the default diversity ambassador? Was it given to them by default based on their ‘diverse’ qualities? Did they choose that role? Did you?
- Who speaks up when something is offensive? Who shakes their head when a rude joke is made?
- Who notices when the team is too similar?
- Who is doing outreach to diversity groups?
- Who’s asking the question: Why don’t we have more men on our team? Why don’t we have more women?
- Are there people who might feel excluded who currently work at your company? or who want to work at your company?
Take inventory.
Who do you believe is doing a good job? Is it one person? Are there multiple people? Are you one of them? These are your diversity ambassadors.
Diversity Ambassadors are great but they can’t do it alone. They can’t be in every conversation. They can’t be the only ones on this mission. It won’t work.
Everyone needs the diversity ambassador mindset.
If everyone has the conversation, it doesn’t fall on the minority group to speak up for minorities. If everyone in your company knows that people should be treated equally, everyone will participate equally in upholding the mission.
Start the conversation in your company. Use a public forum or an anonymous survey. It’s up to you but have the conversation:
- Does this feel like an inclusive workplace?
- Are there things we do that might make team members feel excluded?
- Do you think there are candidates who would feel uncomfortable working here?
- Are there missing perspectives about building the team? about building the product?
- Do we have perspectives on our team who are similar to our customers?
- Are there customer perspectives that are underrepresented on our team?
- Do you have ideas on how we can improve our workplace?
- How as a team do we work to solve this?
This can make people uncomfortable. It can be an awkward situation for any group that feels under- or over-represented. And there likely isn’t an easy answer on how to solve it. But it’s a future worth working towards.
A number of these discussions have already started. I’m curious to hear what you’ve seen work well or go wrong within your organization. Please let me know in the comments or on Twitter.
Businesses that reach massive scale off of old norms have the biggest responsibility to break the bad ones. LinkedIn has the opportunity to change the resume forever.
A recent conversation from the Military Veterans In Tech Meetup:
Job Seeking Vet: “I started an application for Startup/Medium Company/Small Company but I didn’t know where to include my 4 years military experience. I put it under employment but I wasn’t sure what to put for my Manager’s name, phone number and location of employment."
Employed Vet: "Ah, I hate that. I just put in "Uncle Sam, 1-888-550-ARMY and The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Applying for jobs is an exclusive experience. Online job applications are setup to accept backgrounds that look like this:
Traditional College/University -> Employment
Resumes services say, if you don’t have the same background that I had, then you’re not welcome here. You can try to squeeze your experiences into our frameworks but you’ll likely be filtered out for not following directions.
The cultural norms of applications are welcoming those who followed the rules and punishing those who are different. There are some incredibly talented people who’s background looks like this:
College -> Military Service -> Employment
or Military Service -> Employment -> College
We support the people who chose to serve our country but we make design decisions that exclude them from our hiring process.
And as MOOCs and skills school grow, we’ll see more like this soon:
Skills Training -> Apprenticeship -> Employment -> MOOC -> Employment
or MOOC -> Entrepreneur (-> Millionaire)
We want non-traditional education to exist but we don’t organize our employment processes to account for them. If you took a 6 months intensive skills class or finished top of your class in a MOOC, it’s not welcome here. You did the work, but it doesn’t fit into our boxes.
There is a chance for change
This week LinkedIn's CEO Jeff Weiner shared his ambition to host more than 3 billion professional profiles and map the world’s economy. The company is already the go-to source for hosting work experience, education and skills in the US. So much so that employers often accept a LinkedIn profile link in an email or submitted through an app, which according to VentureBeat, is among one of the 500,000 unique domains on the Internet right now that offer LinkedIn features using their API.
LinkedIn owns the digital resume and it still sucks.
- Why is education always at the bottom of the page even though higher education happens between bouts of employment?
- Why isn’t there a way to showcase certificates of coursework completed?
- Why isn’t their a separate bucket for military service? It’s mandatory in some countries and it still doesn’t get it’s own box?
- Why do you have to put in a separate box for each title promotion at the same company? Wouldn’t it be more coherent to show progress under one firm?
With over 100,000 developers using the LinkedIn API, their standard, there is a big opportunity to change the landscape of resumes forever.
Becoming the new standard for any old form of media is not an easy task, but when you are the leader setting the rules, make sure you’re taking the time to set them right.
Last wish for the wise
Even if you’re not using LinkedIn for hiring, take a second look at your process to make sure you’re not turning away non-traditional talent before they hit your doorstep.
If you have other examples of how hiring can be more inclusive or of companies who are doing it right, let’s chat in the comments or on Twitter, @br_ttany. Or if you’re looking to work for a startup, see the USV portco job openings here.