Thanks for this post! I am actively working on improving hiring for EA, especially to support longtermist projects, and appreciate this summary of some key best practices.
I’m currently focusing particularly on roles that are more common, such as personal assistants, where there is a high probability of replicability of the hiring process. The challenge is more on the end of “it is easy for us to find people to do the job”, where there is a strong need for filtering. This might be able to be simplified (in some ways you mention, like strong parameters/ a quick quiz) or being outsourced to an org (like what I’m starting, possibly). While there are unlikely to be many “really-not-a-fit” candidates, the challenge seems to be sorting the “okay” from the “exceptional” and ensuring good work style and workplace culture alignment between the hire and their manager.
I currently have some of the same “topics for further investigation” written down as possible interventions to experiment with. For example, is there a need/demand for interviewing training, or a bank of work sample questions to make hiring processes easier for organizations and higher quality? The creation of these processes, especially without relevant examples to work from, is challenging and time-consuming from scratch!
I’d be interested to talk with you more about your experience and see if there’s an opportunity to collaborate on developing these kinds of things in the next few months.
As far as interviewing training and a bank of questions go, I strongly recommend training interviewers. One relevant anecdote is that the author of Work Rules! mentioning how at Google they created a bank of interview questions for interviewers to use, with each question intended to inquire about a particular trait. Interviewer compliance with the structure is hard, as interviewers tend to want to do their own thing, but at Google they designed a system in which the interviewer could choose questions from a set presented to them, and thus the interviewer still felt as if they were choosing which of the questions to ask the applicant. While they had a computer programmed system with lots of automation, it wouldn’t be too hard to put together a spreadsheet like this with a bunch of questions corresponding to different traits.[1]
Regarding sorting the “okay” from the “exceptional,” I found the idea of this Programmer Competency Matrix helpful (I think it is originally from Sijin Joseph). While I’ve never run a hiring campaign for a programmer, I think that this template/format provides a good example of a fairly simple version for how you could differentiate the different levels of programmers, personal assistants, or any other role. If you want to get a bit more granular than a binary accept or reject, then building a little matrix like this could be quite helpful for differentiating between applicants more granularly.
I’d be happy to lend a hand or share my perspectives on hiring-related efforts at any point.
I copied and adapted these questions a few years ago, but I don’t remember clearly where I got them from. I think it was some kind of a US government “office of personnel” type resource, but I don’t recall the specific details. EDIT: I figured out where I got them from. Work Rules! referred to US Department of Veterans Affairs, which has Sample PBI Questions, from which I copied and pasted most of that spreadsheet.
Thanks for this post! I am actively working on improving hiring for EA, especially to support longtermist projects, and appreciate this summary of some key best practices.
I’m currently focusing particularly on roles that are more common, such as personal assistants, where there is a high probability of replicability of the hiring process. The challenge is more on the end of “it is easy for us to find people to do the job”, where there is a strong need for filtering. This might be able to be simplified (in some ways you mention, like strong parameters/ a quick quiz) or being outsourced to an org (like what I’m starting, possibly). While there are unlikely to be many “really-not-a-fit” candidates, the challenge seems to be sorting the “okay” from the “exceptional” and ensuring good work style and workplace culture alignment between the hire and their manager.
I currently have some of the same “topics for further investigation” written down as possible interventions to experiment with. For example, is there a need/demand for interviewing training, or a bank of work sample questions to make hiring processes easier for organizations and higher quality? The creation of these processes, especially without relevant examples to work from, is challenging and time-consuming from scratch!
I’d be interested to talk with you more about your experience and see if there’s an opportunity to collaborate on developing these kinds of things in the next few months.
As far as interviewing training and a bank of questions go, I strongly recommend training interviewers. One relevant anecdote is that the author of Work Rules! mentioning how at Google they created a bank of interview questions for interviewers to use, with each question intended to inquire about a particular trait. Interviewer compliance with the structure is hard, as interviewers tend to want to do their own thing, but at Google they designed a system in which the interviewer could choose questions from a set presented to them, and thus the interviewer still felt as if they were choosing which of the questions to ask the applicant. While they had a computer programmed system with lots of automation, it wouldn’t be too hard to put together a spreadsheet like this with a bunch of questions corresponding to different traits.[1]
Regarding sorting the “okay” from the “exceptional,” I found the idea of this Programmer Competency Matrix helpful (I think it is originally from Sijin Joseph). While I’ve never run a hiring campaign for a programmer, I think that this template/format provides a good example of a fairly simple version for how you could differentiate the different levels of programmers, personal assistants, or any other role. If you want to get a bit more granular than a binary accept or reject, then building a little matrix like this could be quite helpful for differentiating between applicants more granularly.
I’d be happy to lend a hand or share my perspectives on hiring-related efforts at any point.
I copied and adapted these questions a few years ago, but I don’t remember clearly where I got them from. I think it was some kind of a US government “office of personnel” type resource, but I don’t recall the specific details. EDIT: I figured out where I got them from. Work Rules! referred to US Department of Veterans Affairs, which has Sample PBI Questions, from which I copied and pasted most of that spreadsheet.