How Gusto Built Scalable Hiring Practices Rooted in Tradition | Hacker News Reader

How Gusto Built Scalable Hiring Practices Rooted in Tradition

firstround.com

My 2c as a former Gusto employee:

The watermelon interview was no joke and not a rubber stamp. I wasn't on the watermelon crew but it was a real badge of honor at Gusto to "represent" Gusto's values.

When we hired 200+ people from 2015-2016 across two offices, the watermelon interview was critical to make sure we were hiring the right culture fit Gusties.

Glad to see this covered by FRV and posted on HN.

It's not surprising that it works. It's pretty similar to how henry schein grew and kept its culture. They do the same thing in many ways, looking for compatible culture, during acquisitions as well.

> "service mindset, intellectual curiosity, no ego and the ability to embrace change"

How does one evaluate a candidate fairly across these 4 traits in a 30 minute interview? This type of Cultural Fit interview seem pretty fraught with unconscious bias...

Have multiple diverse interviewers. Calibrate everyone with relatively standard questions by shadowing other interviews. Have everyone write feedback and justify their viewpoint with data from the candidate responses. Make them enter written feedback blind without talking to each other and then combine the feedback at the debrief.

Create an assessment that aims to gauge those traits in an unbiased way, but that would not be a cheap process.

How do you know if it’s a thirty minute interview? My company does a four hour set of interviews; that’s not rare.

> Three to four members of each hiring panel join the offer call, everyone cheers and shares anecdotes from their interviews

I'm always off put with that kind of «relevant only when spontaneous» formalized behavior. How is it supposed to work ? But maybe it's just a culture problem since I'm non US :) .

I'm really not enjoying the corporate world's coopting of words like tradition and culture. Seems very dystopic.

Well the premise is that it should emerge naturally from the group of people, I see it as people centric and not mindless corporate execution in the works.

No question that if it comes of fashion in management, the natural aspect with fade out to a artificial «natural» process that won't work, but I don't see any worse than others awful corporate practise such as group pressured cheering or mandatory good mood.

I’m more skeptical about words like “family,” “values,” and “ownership.” You don’t fire your brother if he doesn’t meet expectations. Corporations ultimately only value money. And, try taking anything with you that you “owned” at a corporation when leaving.

And, don’t even get me started on the word “resources.”

These First Round content marketing articles are uniformly ridiculous, yet they consistently make the HN front page.

I mean guys they are telling you to “groom watermelon farmers“ with a straight face as business advice. I feel like like Mike Judge would have tossed that line out as too over the top.

They don't consistently make the HN front page, or even come close. Looks like 4 out of 30 articles in the last 8 months:

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=firstround.com

The first round writer didn't make up the watermelons. That was a tradition Gusto had since one of their first hires.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com