Lessons from Hiring a Remote Team
cvcompiler.com
cvcompiler.com
Careful with that, it implies you have an issue with trust or micromanagement. As a candidate, I'd roll my eyes and move on.
> Talk about life with your candidates
Careful with this one too. It's illegal to discriminate candidates based on non-work aspects (e.g. candidate has kids). If you're a small company C-suit doing the hiring, this is especially problematic as it can come across to a candidate as being overly nosy and raise flags.
This was a job doing data analyst work. I would not take the job even if they come back with an offer just because it was such a weird interview process.
As a manager, motivation is one of the primary things I focus on. Every employee is different ... some people want money, some people want autonomy, some people want to be mentored, some people want to work on massive systems. I try not to get philosophical (or personal) but I at least try to get a flavor from a candidate as to what their motivation would be and how that might fit into the team.
This is true only when a specific law creates a specific protected class. Discrimination is legal by default. An employer can freely choose who it associates with. It only becomes illegal when a specific law makes it so.
Protected classes in most US jurisdictions include characteristics like gender, race, religion, some medical conditions. Age is a protected class only over age 40; discriminating against a worker of age 39 for being too old, or favoring workers over 40, is entirely legal. I don't know offhand if family status of kids is a protected class.
But protected classes don't include a lot of things that people commonly think they do. Some example non-work factors that are perfectly legal to discriminate on because there is no US law protecting the class: smoking, obesity, height, car you drive, method of commuting, sports team favoritism.
I'm a childless woman at the age where most conversations about vague future life plans are actually inquiries about childbearing.
It's risky and there's just no good reason to do it.
> I have one simple rule: I don’t want to work with people whom I wouldn’t invite for coffee. When hiring a remote team member, I always talk to them about their life plans or favorite books. This small talk shows me whether a person will be a good fit for our team.
This is fine, so long as you recognize your own biases and don't expect to be mirroring yourself on to other people. Humans looking to make an honest living are not your personal canvas. If you look for people who can get along with you without necessarily expecting them to be your "bro", then being chummy with candidates should be acceptable. Be sure to accept people with different interests and personalities.
Not obvious where the "funny" part is.
(tech, econ, whatever)
So if it's "whatever", if you asked me if "Do you read?" and I replied "I read several street signs on my way over here", would that count?
I've read plenty of articles/post-mortems, watched tech-talks, and read docs for new tools and languages, but I've had job applications specifically ask about the last technical book I've read and I've never known what they thought I should have been reading...
There has got to be such a poor correlation between reading and being a good hire, I'm shocked you'd admit to seriously using such an awful filter for hiring. Hiring people that are most like you in appearance, philosophy, mannerisms, hobbies is a TERRIBLE way to hire.
Hrm.... I was under the impression that people hiring were looking for employees/teammembers/coworkers, not buddies??
I don't personally care if I would enjoy coffee/beer with a coworker as long as they are a good teammate, employee, and coworker. I don't find an team full of people that have the same hobbies and enjoy the same literature particularly beneficial in any way.
I just don't think "enjoys the same books as me" is a good test for "makes a good teammate."
In the past I have had some absolutely fantastic coworkers that I had absolutely nothing in common with outside of work and would never want to hang out with (stuff like young earth creationists, has a mail order bride younger than his daughter, incredibly sheltered people, and just weird people). OTOH, some people I've become friends with outside of work make for horrible coworkers (stuff like poor work ethic, poor code quality, horrible attitude towards work, primadonnas in a work setting, control freaks at work). I also worked with a guy who just wouldn't talk about anything personal at work with coworkers (boss obviously different) because he believed in a separation between personal life and work life. No problem, he still made a fine coworker.
I'd very, VERY strongly discourage asking interviewees about their "life plans," like, seriously, this is a BAD idea. Asking about "life plans" can come across as looking to discriminate against people with families, people who plan to start a family soon, or even people who have certain religious beliefs, which is illegal in many parts of the world, including the US. It might seem like a harmless question if a young male is asking another young male "what are your life plans?" in an interview, but it seems a lot less harmless when the interviewee is a female of childbearing age. If an interviewer asked me "what are your life plans?" I'd assume the subtext was "are you planning on going on maturity leave soon?"
Also, what the hell sort of answer to this question would be a "good" answer and what would be a "bad" answer? Are you just looking to hire people with the same life plans as you???
1. Unless you're paying me, I'm not doing homework.
2. This isn't a dating ad, it's an employment offer. You're not hiring PIs.
4. Be careful about building a social club instead of a company
5. I don't work with people who don't understand the separation between work and my personal life. My political views, social views, and what I do with my free time are none of your business as long as I don't make them your business. Frankly, I don't want to be your friend.
7. A book is garbage onboarding. Your onboarding needs to be task oriented and fast. Give them a quick checklist on how to get access, pull down a project, and build it and run tests. Don't expect them to study a godforsaken manual.
A job isn't a friendship, though it's nice if people who you work with are your friends. Friendships also make it harder to quit or fire people.
Lesson #2. Would we make a good coffee date? Why not base it on if they would make a great bowling buddy or dance contest partner? Are they single? Do they have good looking friends that they could set me up with?
Lesson #3 References are a degree more useless for remote candidates. Easier to make up and fake. It worked well 100 years ago when everyone knew everyone less so now.
Lesson #4 Having someone do a test closely mirroring your process is great for temp contractor not so good if you are looking at someone to take your codebase to the next level.
I'd love to see OP expand on this point as I feel the wording distracts from the main point, which is a subtle test of someone's attention to detail and / or facility with written communication, both of which are important for remote work, where 'over-the-desk' clarifications are not available
Actually getting someone in the door requires a lot of work on both sides of the table. It's a perfect and natural way to vet what it's like to work with someone.
I don't think it's unreasonable to use subtle testing like this. We likely do it anyway (i.e we make judgement calls when reviewing someone's online profile, portfolio etc) - all equally sub-optimal but we use it because we need a short cut
I've seen some, in job descriptions, that basically say, "When applying, make sure to tell us why you love [some topic related to the job]".
When trying to hire, it's always a torrent of unqualified candidates and hunting for qualified candidates. No filter is 100% perfect; but broad filters against someone who didn't take 10 minutes to read the job description carefully is useful.
1) Makes it really easy to filter out a large portion of bot applications.
2) Filter out applicants who application spamming, similar to the above bothavior.
3) Filter out applicants who don't read posts or instructions thoroughly. For some types of work this would be a daft filter, but I do actually want my devs to be hungry for minutiae, especially with life-altering decision making.
I’m using this technique too, especially on freelancing sites.
I’ll say something like:
Make sure to include the word “horse” in your application.
This isn’t a trick question.
But the main reason I do this is to avoid bots and bot-like behaviour. Where applicants just copy paste the same mumbo-jumbo into every project, regardless of a fit.
This happens with job applications a lot too. I’d estimate that about 80% of resumes received feel like spam. They are so unqualified it just makes no sense to apply.
E.g. an ad for a NodeJs dev with web experience receives a resume with 10 years of C experience in embedded systems. Also no mention of wanting to change industry or anything like that. Just a resume without prelude.
The second, minor, reason I do this is I check for attention to detail and ability to follow instructions.
Proper on-boarding is pairing, it's a walkthrough, answering questions contextually as they arise.
Not a brain dump of everything you think they should know.
That's the best way to not hire introvert competent people.
I'm also gay and married, that makes any "personal life" questions fraught with discrimination liability.
I had a female friend who would ask every guy she met two questions: 1. Do you have a passport? 2. Do you have a library card?
If the answer to #1 was 'No', then that meant that they had never left the country.
If the answer to #2 was 'No', odds were that they didn't LOVE to read. (This story is from the pre-ereader days)
I've always been fascinated by questions like these that can quickly allow you to parse/grok/filter people with a high degree of success and minimal false positives.
The best I can hope for is "coping"? Doesn't sound so inspiring!
So not really traps at all, and not aimed at tripping candidates up.
If you want attentiveness, then ask for a rational action to be completed... Not senseless idiocy.
* - Had I seen this request(I read the job postings carefully) I would definitely skip the job.
If you're being shady about your interview process, expect to only get people who can't afford to look elsewhere, while good candidates pass you up for potential employers who act respectfully towards the candidate's time.
> It’s reckless to judge a candidate only from the perspective of their portfolio or resume, not seeing this person in real work.
I try to hire exclusively based on portfolio and having an engaged and in-depth conversation with a candidate about their work. Works great! Doesn't waste anyone's time and I've got many excellent candidates who flat out refuse to take tests or do homework to get a job.
> Put some ‘traps’ in the job description
Hell to the f'ing no! Do not work with anyone who tries to trap or trick you during the interview process.
> I have one simple rule: I don’t want to work with people whom I wouldn’t invite for coffee
Grow up. You're not looking for friends you're looking for co-workers.
This company sounds extremely toxic.
"We are friends outside of a work setting" just doesn't correlate to "we work well together." What "we work well together" correlates to is actually "they are professional and respectful, they can do their job, and they have a good work ethic."
Would you want to go to coffee with someone who was staunchly in support of the opposite of your politics (be honest)? What if that person was a great coder and very professional? You're working with them, so the only thing that needs to be judged is if they can do that effectively.
What kinds of positions do you hire for? I can see this possibly working alright for senior positions, but I've interviewed entirely too many people for entry-level positions who seem competent on paper and can talk about technologies on their resume in broad strokes, but struggle to solve even simple problems (e.g. implement an array-based stack) in their environment of choice in a screen-share interview. I started doing these simple exercises intending them to be a way of gaining insight into the candidate's approach, seeing what questions they ask, etc. Instead I find that many candidates simply aren't able to solve the problem, which I would never have guessed from their resume and conversation up to that point in the interview.
There are a lot of young people with the time, energy and passion to develop stuff on their own. They are the juniors I try to hire.
I would expect them to try to figure out what you're looking for, and I would expect them to do some googling to figure out what that means. But I've met too many juniors who couldn't do what you're asking without some coaching, and they all did fine.
Frankly, software development is a team effort, and you have to work to build a team. I've worked for too many companies that expect their entry-level juniors to competently deliver without any coaching, and it just doesn't work. Maybe we're all having so much trouble hiring because we're expecting too much of people and giving them too little help?
On the other hand I had an interview with 4 hours worth of different algorithms questions - for a job where algorithms mattered. And that interview was pretty fun. Even though I didn't get the job.
As for "talking about life" I think it's a great idea. Many people ITT think it's about finding buddies, it's not. It's about getting a reading of the person and be able to make a better decision. This goes both ways, the candidate will also know what type of person he will be working with.
Does he/she have interests outside of the tech world? Maybe contributes to open source projects? Maybe likes learning new things constantly? Etc.
I've been hiring people for almost 20 years for my company, working as a manager in other people's companies, or sharing a project with other freelancers. It's undeniable the chemistry between team members is an important factor.
It also works the other way around, for the candidate to evaluate what kind of person his/her next boss will be like.
Not relevant as long as they are professional and capable at work. Just sounds like a (poor) justification for illegal discrimination.
>Maybe contributes to open source projects?
If you want to know this try asking "do you contribute to open source projects?" instead.
>It's undeniable the chemistry between team members is an important factor.
Sounds like an proxy for illegal discrimination. "Oh, our teams chemistry is important so we don't want to hire an older person/woman/Mormon/mother/Indian/recent immigrant/double amputee because they are too different and would mess up the team chemistry." Even if this isn't intentional its the end result.
I'll tell you what's important for team chemistry - respect and professionalism in a work setting, good work performance, and good work ethic. Not their life ambitions, what type of literature they read or what type of hobbies they have. I've only worked in incredibly diverse teams and it's not a problem for "team chemistry." However, I would think working with someone who could only work with people they are friends with WOULD be a problem, a big problem.
But, really, could you actually honestly defend this position in court if you had to? Doubtful. I'm a childless woman at the age where most conversations about vague future life plans are actually inquiries about childbearing.
But, really, what's an example of a "wrong" answer to this question? Are you really going to say "Oh, she's boring outside of work, lets not hire her?" How silly.
I know a guy (not a coworker of mine) who literally does absolutely nothing outside of work except sleep, play video games, exercise, cook and clean, and very occasionally grabs a beer with me. He rarely leaves the house except to go to work. He's got the most boring life ever but he's gotten several promotions over the course of the first couple years of his career.
And how do you evaluate that in an interview?
> I'm a childless woman at the age where most conversations about vague future life plans are actually inquiries about childbearing.
I already said this is not about life-plans.
> But, really, what's an example of a "wrong" answer to this question? Are you really going to say "Oh, she's boring outside of work, lets not hire her?" How silly.
You are making many assumptions here which clearly indicate you are missing the point. It's not about knowing if the candidate prefers reading Dostoevsky or Dan Brown, it's about knowing a bit more about his/her character and personality.
There are a few issues with "traps" that should be avoided (any kind, not just the one mentioned): (1) Taking a failure to pay attention to a minor detail in a job application and assuming that applies more broadly is a nice idea, but not practical. People make mistakes, people overlook things and they prioritize how much they'll pay attention based on the task, not desire -- i.e. if I'm applying for 30 jobs, 2 of which I'm really excited about, I'll spend more time on the two I'm excited about but I'm probably going to spend as much time reading the description and instructions as I did for the previous 30 because the task is repetitive and similar. (2) It's likely to turn people off -- when I see very specific, very odd instructions in a job application, it's a signal that the company is doing things ... oddly. Are all of their internal processes this rigid? Especially for remote hiring, where your staff usually places a high value on flexibility, it's the wrong message to send.
But it makes you feel good, as the person doing hiring. It looks like a "quick way to eliminate a large number of resumes" and works about as well as all of those other quick ways.
The flip side of this sort of trap is that it can back-fire. Assuming that it truly does weed out candidates who lack an attention to detail, it could also skew toward perfectionist types who get everything perfect ... once it eventually, maybe gets completed at all.
If I'm the hiring manager, then I probably don't want to hire you for the 28 out of 30 jobs you're not interested in.
Sure, you're selecting for perfectionists, but arguably that's better than hiring people who don't really care about your company.
If you're not a FAANG company, you almost have to be hiring folks who are applying to you because "why not", and then pitching them on your company. I've gone to plenty of interviews and been sold on a company that I previously had almost no knowledge of, especially in B2B industries. Massive portions of the jobs in tech are for teams, companies and industries that your average developer has no exposure to, and no real reason to care about, but it doesn't mean people can't become passionate about working there if given more information.
> even though right now I work somewhere you've likely never heard of.
Some of the best companies are hidden gems like this and almost all of the people I've interviewed have started out not knowing who we were before the interview and being very excited to work for us by the end (the others were already excited). Even though we tend to attract great talent -- it's difficult. Frankly, lately, I'd like it if my thinking was "I need fewer people who are ~qualified~ somewhere-in-the-same-time-zone-as-qualified for this position[0]" that would require a trap to weed some out.
[0] And we've paired down our job requirements -- these are also common positions: C# Backend Web / JS Front-end React (with TypeScript as a bonus!)
edit: the year was 2008, President Obama, not 2018 mid-terms (the network was MSNBC)
OP meant that even for the 2 interesting jobs, attention to detail might be lost to the information overload of job searching in general.
> Sure, you're selecting for perfectionists, but arguably that's better than hiring people who don't really care about your company.
OP presented a probable negative bias towards “eventual” workers (I believe I'm somewhat in that category), which you contrast with careless people. These two characteristics are only partially linked and you might want to optimize both, at the cost of effort and time during hiring.
I know for myself, I don't even have a good frame of reference: I have applied mostly for jobs that I have wanted but had a mental ranking in mind before-hand. Regardless, I have generally obsessed over the details. I am far from a perfectionist, I just hear the sound of my dad's voice in the back of my head directing me in exactly how these things are done.
That said, you're completely right about not hiring me if you weren't in my top 3. However, in my case, the company I work for was on the very bottom of my list before I had my first phone screen. My resume got there in a strange manner -- passed to their hiring manager for the purpose of passing to other hiring managers, he gave me a phone call and asked if I'd be interested in interviewing there. I hadn't heard of the place, but went to their site.
The site sold the values of the company in a manner that triggered the skeptic in me[1]; I assumed they were a code-mill at worst, but nothing near what I've found at best. I was also working at home for 12 years and was about to join a company that lacked desk phones/any voice communication outside of conference rooms -- and an open-office environment.
The phone interview put them back toward the top; I liked the two guys I talked to a lot. I arrived and saw the amazing office, which was -- unfortunately -- an open-office floor, and they fell out of my top 3, again. After the interview, they were top on the list. I've been there two years and found the company to be everything they claim to be. It's not that things don't go wrong or that I haven't had a 90 hour week (thrice, however, rarely break 42), it's the people. I'm past 2 years there, now.
[0] Which is kind of what this is: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brown-out/
[1] I'm accused more of being naive than cynical, but I worked 17 years at a large company and this place appeared to be bigger than it was. Identifying the company as a mid-large enterprise vs. an SMB is necessary context that was missing when I was reading their site.
Is it disowning of me, if the absence of A/B testing make me think this is rather random opinions than solid advice?
- Remember to check out local work culture.(Americans stick out like a sore thumb in many western European work social situations)
- Always, always, always have a good leader on site.
Care to elaborate a bit? I'm an American working at a large US University with a very diverse community. I've daydreamed about moving to western Europe, so I'd like to hear what the work social situations you're referring to are.
As an example - corporate events in Europe rarely include a +1. That confused all of my American colleagues, that are used to having their spouses join. Making friendships with people at work requires more than just "we work together".
In England having a pint after work on Thursday or Friday is basically a team building event. You better join in, or you'll stop being invited.(Drinking isn't mandatory, though)
In France - lunch time is not work time, so don't talk about work.
> Put some ‘traps’ in the job description
Good grief.