Hiring your startup’s next great employee

I've read some useless hiring advice posts here, but this one resets the bar. Have a nontechnical person in your technical interviews so that you can be sure at least one person on your interviewing team is human. If you're hiring for a role and meet someone "great" that doesn't work for the role, fuck it, hire them with no role, because a Jim Collins book talked about that. "Ask real life questions", like they do at an interview for a retail job at Best Buy. Oh and here's the "scoring system" you should use for "soft no hard no".

Now, go forth and build an awesome company.

The advice in general is reasonably solid but this particular point is absolute madness:

Around 8 people is perfect to interview a candidate

Half that number is perfect for interviewing a candidate. You simply don't need 8 different opinions to get a gauge on technical ability and culture fit.

I wouldn't even dream of jumping through so many hoops for a job. Finding good people is difficult, adding hurdles like an intense or lengthy interview process just makes it more difficult.

> Me- “Tell me about the last time you got involved in a > debate on HackerNews.” > > Candidate- “Hmm, I don’t really talk to people online. I > don’t see the value in talking to people I don’t know.’ > > She didn’t get the job.

It seems that they were interviewing for a "Technical Community Manager", in which case I can see the logic behind not hiring them.

But if they weren't, I wouldn't suggest that was a "hard no". A lot of people don't get involved on social news sites, for a variety of reasons (maybe they have done in the past and don't like being attacked by a bunch of strangers for their opinions). If they had never heard of HN, I might have to think twice, but I certainly wouldn't rule someone out for not getting involved in "debates" (all too often flamewars) on social news sites.

<< Soft No(-2) means “Nah, there’s just something that doesn’t feel right” << or “Loved her, just not for this role”

<<So remember this when hiring: the person you are interviewing may be <<terrible for the role, but perfect for your company. <<When you find that awesome person, hire them.

I hope there was a little bit more consistency between the rules explained here.

Leveraging your own network may mitigate some of the risks in this article.

<<"Rule #1- It’s much better to say ‘no’ to the right person, than ‘yes’ to the wrong one"

The rule #1 increases the chances of your hire to be a great person, but slows down your hiring, which may mean missed business opportunities.

This is crazy. Hire engineers that can talk to non-technical people, but then have one of these engineers interview non-technical people to make sure that non-technical people can talk to engineers? But the engineer can already talk to non-technical people, so that wouldn't work!

It's amazing that just about every single one of these "how to hire" articles presumes that the perfect employee is wandering around out there waiting to be discovered. Very, very few seem to consider that great employees are developed.