I ran my first hiring process to hire someone for an EA role last year and was amazed how long it took me. I’ve hired around 20 times in the past and only spent a couple weeks and 20-40h per role. Last year I spent 8 months and hundreds of hours. I reflected afterwards on why and can list a few hypotheses:
normally rely heavily on gut to build my shortlist. Did not feel comfortable doing this for this role as it felt like there were so many failure modes for a bad hire. Both ways that a hire could go badly and severity of impact for a hire going badly.
normally relying on intuition heavily is highly reversible. Worst case scenario I have to fire the candidate after probation, I’ll never see them again and no one knows them. I’m open with candidates that this is my policy and that they should be careful accepting an offer. In EA I felt like everyone knows everyone and a fired hire could cause significant reputational damage with a one-sided narrative. I don’t endorse this view as rational but the fear was definitely a factor in why I took so long.
I was hiring for a role that defies regular role definition. No one applying to the role had applied to a similar position before let alone worked in one. Potentially this was the largest factor and my other points are moot.
I wasn’t hiring someone to have similar skills to me, instead hiring someone to have the skills I don’t have. Normally I would judge experience, passion, intelligence, lateral thinking ability, ambition and team fit then let a team lead judge specific ability.
many candidates treated the process like a 2 way application the whole way through the process. This three off my intuitions and normally I would have dropped all candidates who weren’t signalling they were specifically very excited about my role. First call excluded.
many candidates’ conversations included career advice from me. This threw off my intuitions but I consider it time well spent in ll the cases where I spent over 2h
I worried a lot about how much time of others I was using. Assuming a candidate spent 4x more time than I did, I used over a thousand hours of people’s time.
ultimately I made offers to two candidates both of which I had had strong gut feelings about very early, which was rewarding but also highly frustrating.
The key thing I intend to change next time is being much faster. I didn’t feel like (for me) the extra process complexity and caution added that much insight and crucially, it threw off my intuition.
The main downside of reduced complexity seems to be the increased chance of a bad hire and the potential damage of firing them. I think next time I will return to my original method and be very transparent with the person I make an offer to that their 3 month probation is not just a formality, pointing them to this article as an explanation to why it’s not worth it for others for me to have a long drawn out process that may only slightly reduce the risk of a bad hire.
Caveat:
** I do not advocate anyone else doing this unless they are confident in their hiring intuitions. I also haven’t tried it yet and it may go terribly. **
“ultimately I made offers to two candidates both of which I had had strong gut feelings about very early, which was rewarding but also highly frustrating.”—I hope this comment doesn’t come across as incredibly mean, but, are you getting that from notes made at the time? When I find myself thinking “this is what I thought we’d do all along”, I start to suspect I’ve conveniently rewritten my memories of what I thought. Do you have a sense of how many candidates you had similar strong positive gut feelings about?
many candidates treated the process like a 2 way application the whole way through the process. This three off my intuitions and normally I would have dropped all candidates who weren’t signalling they were specifically very excited about my role. First call excluded.
I wonder whether this is just a result of people on both sides of the application process knowing each other in a social context.
If the candidate knows they will interact with people making the hiring decision in the future, they might not want them to feel bad about rejecting them. The people making the hiring decision might arguably feel less bad about not hiring someone if the candidate wasn’t that excited. Lack of excitement also allows the candidate to save face if they get rejected, which also only matters because the candidate and the person making the hiring decision might interact socially in the future.
Thanks for this; it’s interesting to think about why gut intuitions didn’t carry over into the EA hiring process.
In EA I felt like everyone knows everyone and a fired hire could cause significant reputational damage with a one-sided narrative.
Wouldn’t this be ameliorated by providing a reference where you clearly state your views about the hire? I think most hiring managers understand that not every role is a fit for every person.
I wasn’t hiring someone to have similar skills to me, instead hiring someone to have the skills I don’t have.
Huh, what were the skills you were trying to hire for? Could an advisor or board member with that skillset have been looped into the hiring process?
I ran my first hiring process to hire someone for an EA role last year and was amazed how long it took me. I’ve hired around 20 times in the past and only spent a couple weeks and 20-40h per role. Last year I spent 8 months and hundreds of hours. I reflected afterwards on why and can list a few hypotheses:
normally rely heavily on gut to build my shortlist. Did not feel comfortable doing this for this role as it felt like there were so many failure modes for a bad hire. Both ways that a hire could go badly and severity of impact for a hire going badly.
normally relying on intuition heavily is highly reversible. Worst case scenario I have to fire the candidate after probation, I’ll never see them again and no one knows them. I’m open with candidates that this is my policy and that they should be careful accepting an offer. In EA I felt like everyone knows everyone and a fired hire could cause significant reputational damage with a one-sided narrative. I don’t endorse this view as rational but the fear was definitely a factor in why I took so long.
I was hiring for a role that defies regular role definition. No one applying to the role had applied to a similar position before let alone worked in one. Potentially this was the largest factor and my other points are moot.
I wasn’t hiring someone to have similar skills to me, instead hiring someone to have the skills I don’t have. Normally I would judge experience, passion, intelligence, lateral thinking ability, ambition and team fit then let a team lead judge specific ability.
many candidates treated the process like a 2 way application the whole way through the process. This three off my intuitions and normally I would have dropped all candidates who weren’t signalling they were specifically very excited about my role. First call excluded.
many candidates’ conversations included career advice from me. This threw off my intuitions but I consider it time well spent in ll the cases where I spent over 2h
I worried a lot about how much time of others I was using. Assuming a candidate spent 4x more time than I did, I used over a thousand hours of people’s time.
ultimately I made offers to two candidates both of which I had had strong gut feelings about very early, which was rewarding but also highly frustrating.
The key thing I intend to change next time is being much faster. I didn’t feel like (for me) the extra process complexity and caution added that much insight and crucially, it threw off my intuition.
The main downside of reduced complexity seems to be the increased chance of a bad hire and the potential damage of firing them. I think next time I will return to my original method and be very transparent with the person I make an offer to that their 3 month probation is not just a formality, pointing them to this article as an explanation to why it’s not worth it for others for me to have a long drawn out process that may only slightly reduce the risk of a bad hire.
Caveat:
** I do not advocate anyone else doing this unless they are confident in their hiring intuitions. I also haven’t tried it yet and it may go terribly. **
Thank you to the OP for posting. Illuminating!
“ultimately I made offers to two candidates both of which I had had strong gut feelings about very early, which was rewarding but also highly frustrating.”—I hope this comment doesn’t come across as incredibly mean, but, are you getting that from notes made at the time? When I find myself thinking “this is what I thought we’d do all along”, I start to suspect I’ve conveniently rewritten my memories of what I thought. Do you have a sense of how many candidates you had similar strong positive gut feelings about?
Thank you for a very helpful comment!
haha—good question. And yes, from notes.
I wonder whether this is just a result of people on both sides of the application process knowing each other in a social context.
If the candidate knows they will interact with people making the hiring decision in the future, they might not want them to feel bad about rejecting them. The people making the hiring decision might arguably feel less bad about not hiring someone if the candidate wasn’t that excited. Lack of excitement also allows the candidate to save face if they get rejected, which also only matters because the candidate and the person making the hiring decision might interact socially in the future.
Thanks for this; it’s interesting to think about why gut intuitions didn’t carry over into the EA hiring process.
Wouldn’t this be ameliorated by providing a reference where you clearly state your views about the hire? I think most hiring managers understand that not every role is a fit for every person.
Huh, what were the skills you were trying to hire for? Could an advisor or board member with that skillset have been looped into the hiring process?
I think “three” should be “threw”