Hacker News Reader

Comment by blazespin | Hacker News Reader

To be completely honest, it's actually an intriguing idea. I wonder, assuming some basic level of competency, if you gave a candidate some completely orthogonal task unrelated to the career and they excelled at it (assuming no cheating), would they be a better hire than another candidate?

Maybe! Quite often success at work is determined by getting crap done that doesn't require the skills you trained for initially.

View on HN

> if you gave a candidate some completely orthogonal task unrelated to the career and they excelled at it... would they be a better hire

This idea has been tried. It’s called college.

True enough, and it works to a certain degree I think.

This would also imply that there's probably fruitful hiring ground in picking from anyone inside your organization (where you have the most direct knowledge) who does their job well, no matter what it is.

I'm given to understand companies used to do this.

Let’s take it to another level: the candidate realises that if they kill a current employee with the skills exactly matching theirs, would you hire them (assuming you can’t prove they killed the employee but it’s blatantly obvious) or would you think that’s unacceptable?

In Terry Pratchett's Assassins Guild they would hire them.

I remember a book by Jim Cramer in which he told a story about how he was offered a job "if you go in that office and fire that guy, right now". He did, and was.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com