Standardizing our Interviews

My current team has grown to a bit over 50 people, including contractors.  We are constantly hiring for some function or another and some of my staff seem better at hiring than others.  Some teams seem to attract and retain great staff.  Some struggle a bit.  Even within a team, our hiring experiences vary.

I am not surprised that we have these challenges.  The SVP of "People Operations" at Google, speaking about their hiring practices said "Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading expert."

So what are we doing about it?  A couple of things.  First, we are putting together a small set of attributes that every candidate will be evaluated against and a set of questions that can be used to test for those attributes.  We are going to try to improve consistency of our interviews and see if we can get everyone to adopt best practices.

Second, I now interview every candidate.  As the leader of my organization, I need to be responsible for the quality of the staff.  Problem is, I am not scalable and I bring my own biases.  I know that the CEOs of some internet companies want to review all hires.  I get why.  And to be fair, I don't know that my involvement will fix the problem.  But I can make sure that we are hiring people that I can stand behind.

Ah, well.  First step is recognizing the problem.  I'll tackle the scaling issue when it becomes acute.

Amazon does something interesting.  As part of the interview loop, the candidate is evaluated on if they will make Amazon smarter.  And the person doing the eval is not part of the reporting structure.  I think they are part of HR.  I like the notion.