Key hires - The case for extreme referencing | Hacker News Reader

Key hires - The case for extreme referencing

joshhannah.com

25 pointsJackHerrick7 comments

Well the style is a bit know-it-all, but he makes some good points.

Main point: An engineer will have a body of work that can be evaluated and tests that can be given [...] However, if you are hiring a CFO, CTO, VP of Business Development or top marketing and sales executives, it’s not so easy. [...] Base 80 percent of your hiring decision on thorough reference checking

I actually think references are underused in the more technical areas too. There's little point in having a person pass a bunch of tests if they are hard to work with, or lose motivation easily, or are sloppy with their practices, and so on.

And:

You should plan to talk to all their direct supervisors, some peers, and at least a few people who reported to them.

I couldn't agree more. Supervisors rarely have the whole picture and yet most employers will only seek references from them. Especially in software where a lot of people are matrix-managed or team-managed, that strikes me as woefully inadequate.

Thanks for the comments and sorry for the style. I don't think I'm a know it all type, but I'm guessing most notable types don't think they are! Anyway I'm kind of new to blogging so hopefully my writing style will get better over time.

Well thank you for being so gracious about it :-)

As I tend to suffer from the same problem, let me offer a bit of advice that I have encountered: the difference between coming across as knowledgeable and know-it-all is the motives you ascribe to those who do not agree with you.

For example in this case, the tone in this case is "people don't put enough wait on references" with the implication of "because they don't realise how important this is! the fools! here let me enlighten you". A better way to address it is to imagine (even though I grant you, I am sure the former explanation is probably more likely) that people don't put enough wait on references for some legitimate-in-their-minds reason; for example, because they don't believe a stranger can be trusted over their own experience with the candidate. What would you say to that person?

In other words, it is best to go for the anti-straw man - imagine your opinion piece is in dialogue with the most reasonable person possible that could disagree with you.

By the way, since I am inflicting my opinion upon you, I also find that asking people what the worst mistake they have made is not a very productive question. And I can imagine receiving a reference request from somebody who was asking me that question for one of my crew - I'd probably get rather protective of them and not answer as candidly as I would with a more open question.

However my world is light years from VP circles, perhaps things are different up there :-)

btw when i said notable I meant know-it-all... had hand surgery recently and speech-to-text is not 100%

the reason I came on so strong was that (maybe misguidedly) I felt like I really have to sell the idea of spending 10+ hrs on this, or of really being willing to go back to the drawing board if refs are" good but not great" -- there is so much inertia in the way people usually run the process. but i take your point that, in attempting to do so, I may have failed (and in fact come across smugly)...

That list of referencing questions is gold.

This one:

• Would you hire him for the role as I have described it?

is always going to elicit "yes" as an answer (any other answer would be an automatic no-hire). So probably a better way to ask it is:

• How would you change the role we're considering him for to best suit his abilities?

  Great suggestion. Thanks.  I've edited it to incorporate your change.

reference != recommendation

Reply on news.ycombinator.com