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00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Here’s my number one tip for listeners of this podcast episode. The most unreasonably effective thing to do in recruiting is to move quickly, especially as a small company where you have the ability to do that.

00:00:16 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse.

Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it.

I’m Adam Wiggins here today with my colleague, Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And a fun little announcement here, we’re growing the Muse team, or we have grown the Muse team, I think it’s the right way to say it.

So the designer storyteller position we posted a while back, we’re very pleased to welcome Linda Ma to the team as our 6th team member, and indeed we’ve also had some great candidates for what could be #7, that’s the local first engineer, so we kind of hope slash expect to have a similar announcement on that in the not too distant future.

And this is what made me think it would be time to finally do an episode we’ve talked about for ages, which is on the topic of hiring or recruiting or perhaps team building. And this is something you’ve done quite a lot of, particularly a little bit of Hiroku and a ton at Stripe, and indeed you even have an article on your website, Thoughts on recruiting that I’ll link to, but maybe you can start us off by giving an overview of what you think hiring is all about and why it matters.

00:01:28 - Speaker 1: Oh, I have so much to say about recruiting, and it’s hard to believe we’ll even fit it all in close to one episode, but A couple of things I’ll say at this stage. One is that obviously the team that you build is gonna be the company that you build and the product that you end up building.

It’s really the foundation.

That I think is pretty obvious, but I think people often forget that.

The other side of it is that this is a huge part of people’s lives.

If you work, say, at 4 years for a company, that might be 5% of your mortal human life, you know, spent much of your waking time spent there. And maybe it’s a 10th of your career.

So it’s a really big deal on both sides, and I don’t think that people treat it with the seriousness and importance and gravity that it deserves.

Just kind of throw something up on indeed and, you know, respond to the emails or whatever. I don’t know. It just seems like such an important topic that really merits deep thought.

00:02:21 - Speaker 2: It is certainly part of the Silicon Valley culture to say hiring is, for example, hiring is job one for the CEO. That might be a phrase that someone might bandy about, but I would argue maybe some of that ends up putting a lot of emphasis on the quantity of hiring and the speed at which you do it rather than the quality and the quality not just of the candidates in terms of how they fit the company, but the team that you’re building and how it integrates and fits together and ultimately can. Do what you’re there to do, which is, you know, build the product.

00:02:53 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think a big theme of this discussion is going to be holistically thinking about recruiting, hiring, team building, and zooming out a little bit, and it’s not just about all the little tactics, it’s really easy to get to zoomed in on that. We got to keep in mind the goal of having an effective productive team, and considering all the things that can lead up to that.

00:03:14 - Speaker 2: I think an important part of what we’re talking about here as well is that we’re obviously talking largely about hiring the technology industry, which is where all our experience is, but I think an important part of it is hiring creative people to create something that’s often fairly novel in the world, and so you really need, there’s the whole mission driven concept and being aligned and sharing values, all of these things I think are an important part of it.

That’s one piece of it is I think you really need to get people who are going to put their spirits into it in a way that It’s not just do they have the skills, it’s a do their passions line up with the things the company needs.

And a related thing is the immense privilege we have being in this industry, which is it’s a very in demand field and so the people who are being hired side of the equation, they have a lot of options. Not only are they well paid, but they have the luxury, you know, if you’re good at interviewing and have the right CV and everything like that, you may be able to get offers from several places. So the hiring manager is often not just kind of this doing this transaction of here’s the work that needs to be done, here’s the skill set, and here’s the compensation.

But actually there is an element of getting them to join your club, perhaps getting them to join your cult, buying in on the mission, believing in it in a deep way.

And I’m reminded a little bit of this 80s movie Ghostbusters, where you have the original founding team of Ghostbusters, who are these kind of kooky types, or at least some of them are these kooky types that have all these beliefs in the supernatural and the occult and so on. At some point they realize they need help and they go to hire someone new and, you know, they’re basically asking interview questions about, what do you believe. This and this and this, and he just says, look, there’s a steady paycheck in it. I’ll believe anything you want. That’s probably not what you want for creative work. You want someone who is going to buy in because indeed the things they care about and working on in their career, perhaps things they’ve worked on in the past or their personal passions match up to some degree with what the company’s mission is.

00:05:16 - Speaker 1: Indeed, one of my little recruiting nuggets is that the primary challenge with recruiting in this technology industry is attraction, not filtering.

I think people go to filtering things like, what are the interview questions and what are the criteria that we’re gonna use to knock people out of the process because it’s more inwards focus, it’s more about you and what you’re doing in the office day to day. And also because I think people are keying off of companies like Google, of which is a very small number that have a legitimate filtering issue where they have a huge number of people applying. The challenge for the overwhelming majority of software companies is that people don’t apply to your job, they don’t even know about it. That’s why I think this attraction problem is so important.

00:05:55 - Speaker 2: Well, I thought a good way to structure this might be to talk through the hiring process we use at Muse.

Now, Muse, importantly, is not a growth oriented startup, but I think we do need to attract in your wording here in the same way that a faster hiring company would, and this is a process I think you and I have used a bit at Hiroku. I’ve used in different companies and it’s kind of what we use in Muse.

And not to be too process focused, but maybe in talking through it, we sort of reveal the tips and tricks, the values, the approaches, the painful lessons we’ve learned over the years.

Maybe also worth as a glossary here, kind of defining a couple of terms that I will certainly come back to a lot. One is team. And that the team of people that you’re trying to put together to again be sharing those values and having work in chemistry and a sense of creative trust and the ability to make commitments to each other and keep each other accountable, that’s a key part of this.

You’re not just trying to hire individual people, you’re trying to build a team and each of those people needs to be integrated into the team. And I was like the anti- example of a team, which is something like US Congress. The members of Congress may be colleagues, but they are not a team because they really don’t have the same, many of them don’t share values or have the same end goal, and so it’s a contentious sort of finding of constant compromise, but I think a good team is one that does share more values, goal, mission, and so therefore you’re getting to great, great outcomes.

The kind of team is one word in there.

And then two others that will come up a lot, I think is manager or hiring manager. And actually doing a whole podcast on management is another topic that’s in my backlog somewhere, but at least for the purpose of our discussion here, take a hiring manager and then the person who not only figures out who should come into the team, but also helps them be successful is a big part of this equation. And then the job description is the other one, and we’ll probably start there. So a clear written description of why you want to hire, what problem is being solved, and what candidate would look like that would kind of fit that slot.

00:08:05 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s a good baseline to have. So, where does the process start for you?

00:08:09 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, number one is the hiring manager writes a job description.

And obviously that starts with whoever is going to do the hiring kind of recognizing a need.

So this is why it’s important to, to my mind, label a hiring manager who is a single owner for this, as someone who’s identified. We need someone on the team and we’re going to figure out exactly what that looks like and do the filtering, both the attraction and the filtering that you mentioned, but also the onboarding and helping them be successful on the team. But that kind of clarity of here’s a single owner for this project because it really is a project and they may take input from a lot of sources to create the job description, which is a written thing you’re going to post somewhere that tells people what you’re looking for in the role and about your company, but that person is going to really own that whole process.

00:09:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I’m a really big fan of having this alignment between the person who’s eventually going to be responsible for the person’s success on the team all the way back to writing the job description and sourcing the candidates and running the interview process. I’ve observed that in large companies, this often gets broken up among a bunch of different people.

Sometimes, you know, for The defensible reasons, let’s say, but you have the recruiter and the executive, and the group manager and the manager, and the saucer, and the zillion people, and no one’s really responsible, a candidate’s bouncing around through all these folks, and you don’t get a strong, coherent, unified vision for what this job is gonna be and why it’s awesome.

So I think we can get away with it, having a more unified approach is the best.

00:09:43 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I’m not a big fan at all of kind of recruiting in HR, playing a big role, especially early screening. I I understand why that specialization makes sense.

I’ve worked with great recruiters and great HR people who are very good at what they do, and certainly they take the weight off of the team leads or hiring managers that have lots of other responsibilities. They have their own specialized skills in some cases for just Dealing with people and following up correctly and so on, but yeah, some more unified ownership, I think creates a better experience for the candidates, and I think it is more likely to make the whole process kind of be successful. What does a good job description look like for you, Mark?

00:10:23 - Speaker 1: For me, it’s effective in convincing the best candidates that they should begin a conversation.

And let me contrast that to what I often see in job descriptions, which is speaking to sort of the median candidate and giving them as many reasons as possible not to apply, right? You don’t paint a picture of why the job is compelling, why the teammates are going to be great, what they’re gonna learn, and you get this whole laundry list of, you know, so-called requirements, many of which are not even useful. So when I’m writing a JD I’m thinking.

Maybe I have a handful of people who are ideal archetypal candidates. Why, when they read this, are they going to be interested in speaking to us? And once they speak to us, you know, that starts a whole another part of the process and we can almost forget about the JD in a sense. But you just want to get that first conversation.

So it’s again, it’s about attracting the right candidates and you don’t need to really care about what we candidates think, and you don’t need to care too much about strong people applying who aren’t exactly the right fit.

That’s a good problem to have. You’re just trying to get some initial attraction from strong candidates.

00:11:27 - Speaker 2: Yeah, being specific so that when someone who is the right person reads it and says, this is me, and feels compelled to apply, but also not so specific that you, as you said, repel people.

The requirements section in particular is a dislike of mine where it’s for example 3 years of experience with a particular technology, but I think it’s really a certain set of characteristics in the person’s personality and the kinds of things they’ve worked on in the past and what they’re drawn to and the types of problems they’re good at solving and certainly for a technical role technology experience is first of all important to talk about.

But secondly, helps people know what the position really is and helps define it.

If it says you’re a great swift engineer, then you know that’s going to help clarify a lot, but saying you have exactly this many years of experience with a particular technology in the Apple ecosystem is a little bit too, I don’t know, just leads to disqualification for not a good reason.

But then you always have this balance between, you don’t want to be too vague. Because then it doesn’t speak to anybody, but if you’re too specific, you disqualify potential good candidates, and in a way, you don’t know who you’re looking for, right? You’re trying to like put this beacon, this attractor out into the world and you have a vague idea.

Hopefully that idea is based a little bit on the exercise of dream candidates.

So this is something I like to do, which is, OK, if you could get anyone in the world, even someone who’s completely ungettable because they’re a celebrity or they’re busy with their own thing or whatever. Who to be. And if you get 345 of those examples, and you look for attributes they share, and you write down those attributes in the job description, that’s very likely gonna, in my experience, do the job you described, which is help attract those great candidates without having the specificity that repels people for no reason.

00:13:19 - Speaker 1: And the flip side, by the way, of the industry not taking this recruiting process very seriously is that most jobs and JDs are actually not good. So if you have a really good job, if you’re offering a genuinely good opportunity and you write a really compelling JD, you can actually pull a lot of people out of the woodwork with that.

00:13:40 - Speaker 2: Absolutely, I always considered a good sign when we get people applying who say, I’m happily employed, I’m not looking for a new thing in any way, but this was just so interesting. I just had to talk to you, something of that nature.

00:13:56 - Speaker 1: One other thing I’ll say about JD, I do think the main role is outwards facing attraction.

JDs also are helpful internally for getting the team on the same page about what this person is going to be doing.

We were working through this recently with the local first engineer. We decide, OK, is this person gonna be doing protocol design and distributed systems, or is it more like working on the clients, the iOS client or the JavaScript client, or is it more like a just a pure back and go engineer or is it some linear combination, or is it choose your own adventure? And just having that conversation is good. And like to your point about concreteness, you paint a picture about what success is gonna look like and what they’re gonna be accomplishing, and that also is gonna be, you know, resonant and coherent with the team is expecting, which is good.

00:14:41 - Speaker 2: Yeah, a hugely important part of the job description is what they’ll be working on and as specific as possible past features, for example, that you shipped in your product that you can link to the blog post or some open source thing that says, here’s the sort of thing we’ve done in the past that is similar to the sort of thing that we expect this role would do in the future.

Incidentally, I think in working through this process with our longtime colleague Peter van Hardenberg years back, he said something that stuck in my mind, which is he said, Ah, so I should think of hiring as being like looking for a new guitarist for my rock band. Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a lot to that. And if you think a little bit more in terms of the skills matter, but you are looking for a, obviously the rockstar idea is hackneyed, but someone who’s really going to add something new to your unique team, and they’re gonna fill a specific skill, but you also don’t want to be too prescriptive, and ultimately you also want to find someone that, you know, fits in your vibe, fits in your style of music, fits into your artistic point of view.

Alright, so you’ve got your hiring manager, you got a great job description, hopefully you circulate internally, which often is by itself is a reveal in the sense that either people realize they don’t agree about what it is we think we’re hiring for, or in some cases with larger companies you actually end up with internal candidates basically showing up where they say actually I’d love to do that job that I basically shift from what I’m doing right now. That can be quite an interesting sort of internal recruiting approach.

00:16:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s very important. And by the way, you can also share it externally, including with some of your ideal archetypal candidates, because that already starts a little bit of a conversation and there’s a little bit of a stronger relationship and invariably when you read a really compelling job description, some little piece of your brain becomes invested in wearing that hat.

00:16:33 - Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s true. There’s also this element of long-term recruiting.

I read a book sometimes back, I should have looked up the citation for the episode here, that basically is kind of a more classic business book on hiring, but talked about.

Hiring like really senior executives, I think this is probably more like public companies or whatever, but they told a story of someone who worked a CEO who worked on hiring a specific person that they wanted on the team for 10 years, and it was the sort of thing like where every time the hiring manager would fly through the candidate’s hometown, they would, you know, basically pay. A visit. Let me stop in for a drink. Let me pitch you why you should join the team again. They did this, you know, every year or two over the course of a long time, and eventually, because so much of it is about where the candidate is in their life, right? It really is about timing when they’re in a moment where they’re thinking of something new or ready for a change, that’s just really key. And so you can’t always Guess that for your ideal candidates, especially the people you don’t know personally, but by floating the job description in front of them, you get that little seed planted in the mind, maybe you don’t end up hiring this time around, but maybe a year or two later they come back and the time is right.

00:17:42 - Speaker 1: Absolutely, recruiting is a long game.

00:17:45 - Speaker 2: So that leads us to just kind of getting the job description out of the world. There’s, yeah, sharing it privately with your ideal candidates. There’s sourcing, which can be anything from scouring LinkedIn to looking for people that might be a fit, to just like, kind of thinking through your own personal networks, and there’s direct advertisement, right? There’s job boards, stack overflow, GitHub jobs, hacker news, who’s hiring threat is very good. How do you think about all that fitting together?

00:18:14 - Speaker 1: Let me actually talk first about hosting the JD so, The issue with recruiting is that both sides of the transaction, the hiring company and the candidate, have very little information about each other.

If everyone had perfect information, you would just go to the company that was right for you and start the job and everyone would be happy.

The issue is that there’s imperfect information, and so whenever you’re undertaking some work in the recruiting process, the candidate is going to be performing a huge update in the Bayesian sense about your quality and fit as a company.

And this is why when we go deeper into the interview process, there’s gonna be so many important things there.

But potentially the very first thing they see is the JD.

So when I’ve had the chance, I’ve invested a lot in making very high quality JDs not only just they were written right, but that, for example, they were on our domain.com/. The name of the job. They had excellent typography. We even commissioned custom artwork for our original local first sync engineering job. And you know, some of these things work out and some don’t, but just showing the candidate that you are walking the walk of really caring about this job and thinking it’s important, verse, you know, potentially you put it up on a third party job site. It’s like, you know, your subdomain.job site.com/sh, you know, some horrible EUID and then they go there and like the colors are all wrong and they fill out a form, it’s like 17 buttons, you know, it doesn’t send to me the message that you really care about this candidate in this job, so. I think it’s worth putting some effort into the actual posting.

00:19:39 - Speaker 2: Yeah, to me that might reflect the conventional power dynamic between a sort of job seeker and job offerer, which is very often the employer is the one in the kind of the position of power and the person who is being hired is kind of hat in hand, you know, please can I have a job.

And that is really not how it is in the tech industry, and so I would hope if you were hiring anywhere, you would seek to try to make it feel like a very mutual and even and balanced transaction.

I think that benefits everyone, but in the tech world, you know, you really do need to think in terms of you’re trying to get people who have so many options and Yeah, it’s really worth your while to do everything you can to give them a great user experience just the same way that you would a user of your product.

00:20:27 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and then to your question about actual sourcing. I mean, to be honest, I’ve had most of my luck with network-based sourcing and inbound based on really high quality public materials. So I think Muse has been a good example of this. We’ve had some sourcing and recruiting conversations via our network, often.

In combination with all this public material that we produce, especially the podcasts and the memos, I can’t tell you how many candidates we’ve spoken to who come to our local first engineer screens, like, you know, I’ve listened to all your podcasts, I’m excited about everything you’re doing. Tell me more about what you guys are up to. And that’s a huge leg up versus going in cold to get up jobs or something, which is the thing you can do and we’ve done it before, it’s just much harder. So I think where you can do it in network and or buttress with high quality public material that helps a lot.

00:21:15 - Speaker 2: I think the two of them do really work together, and I’ve had good luck with paid job descriptions in pretty targeted spaces, something like you want an Android developer, so you go into the biggest Android email newsletter, for example, versus something more general like Stack Overflow.

Also, conferences can, you know, you basically give a talk and you have the requisite we’re hiring slide at the beginning or the end is also a way to get the word out of it.

Yeah, I think you need to tell people and you need to say it publicly and loudly. And that will get the conversations going in your network, right? So you can try to think of everyone you want to talk to and email them and say, here’s the link we’re thinking of hiring, but it’s really a lot better if you tweeted it a week ago. They saw it kind of looked at it briefly in that half distracted state that any of us are in or. Looking through social media, they saw it and they’re like, oh, you know, that’s really interesting, and it kind of, you know, the seeds in their mind, and then if you email them a week later and say, hey, we were thinking you might be a fit for this. Would you like to talk? And they say, oh, it’s funny, you know, that’s been in the back of my mind, and it basically opens the conversation more easily. So I think putting those two together is a really good idea.

00:22:21 - Speaker 1: The last thing I’d say on sourcing candidates is that I do think outbound is possible. It gets a bad rap because it’s often very spammy coming out of these large companies with just template emails and so on. But if you first make an effort to identify people who are genuinely a good fit, and then to show very good proof of work in your outreach email, like basically it’s not a template, it’s customized to the intersection of their public profile and your job description. I think that’s pretty reasonable, and I’ve gotten OK responses on those.

00:22:54 - Speaker 2: And the bad version of this is the classic LinkedIn recruiter. I still get these. I see you have written open source projects on Ruby on Rails. I have a Ruby on Rails developer position that may be exciting for you, and they just clearly haven’t looked at anything about anything I’ve been doing in the last decade.

It’s all very automated, whereas, yes, if you say, hey, you know, I came across you by the work you did on this open source project. And I see you’ve been active on that recently, and I read more, you know, on your blog, and saw that you’re really interested in the space that we’re working in, and I thought I’d run this by you to see what you think.

Something like that can at a minimum, just again, plant a good seed or something like that, rarely gives a bad impression, and it can sometimes produce some good conversations.

Now once you get to the filtering stage, if you’ve done a good job, you should have lots of candidates coming through, right? And I think it’s important here, this actually connects to a larger perspective I have on kind of systematic searches, which I think can be applied to a lot of things in life, whether you’re looking for a university to go to or, you know, you’re looking for a school for your kid or you’re looking for a home to live in or something like that, and certainly it’s true for job seeking. And it’s true for candidates as well, which is that I think it should be on both sides. A job seeker should be opening many conversations with many plausible fits and then using that to do their own filtering down to the best opportunities for themselves, and then on the other side, the employers should be doing the same thing.

00:24:24 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and just to elaborate that, I think there’s a benefit for the recruiting company on having some volume. I think you want at least 5 to 10 people on what you’ve called the initial screen stage. We’ll talk about that terminology. Just because by having a little bit of volume, you basically get better at it. You get some practice and you start to better triangulate what you’re actually looking for because of the conversations with the candidate. For example, the candidate will ask, you know, am I gonna be doing this or this? and like, oh well, actually it’s a good question. You know, actually it’s more like this you go up to the GD and then when you have a subsequent conversation, it’s a little bit more dialed in.

00:24:55 - Speaker 2: It’s really important to know what you’re looking for when you start and have clarity about that, but on the other hand, I do often get more clarity through those conversations and realize in some of the early interviews, oh, maybe we’re looking for is kind of too many skills mushed together, it’s actually a little too broad, or maybe the other way around, it’s actually too narrow and we should really pair up with this other thing. I’m kind of realizing there’s really sort of two things we’re looking for, maybe it’s worth pulling those apart into two different job descriptions. You may discover that through the process.

00:25:27 - Speaker 1: And even just the words that you use, cause again, we’re trying to find a resonant frequency with the candidate, and that can be made or broken just by what you call things. And so after you go through a few of these, you find that, you know, local first resonates better than distributed systems. OK, and now I can take that to your next session.

00:25:47 - Speaker 2: Didn’t we for the job post where we eventually got Adam Wulf, I feel like we even had two variations, was there maybe like the systems engineer and the can’t even remember what we had, we basically couldn’t decide which one we thought would be more appropriate, even though we thought they would both feel kind of the same slot on the team. To parallel job descriptions essentially had them both out and we’re interviewing for both of them, right?

00:26:12 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that was a very interesting experiment. I remember one was systems engineer, the other one might have been iOS engineer, and like you were saying, they were for the same role.

It was this idea of someone working on a very high performance, sophisticated iOS client.

And we had one track that we imagined, which is we eventually hired Wulf with, which was more of a classic iOS developer who cared a lot about performance and systems thinking.

And the other one was more like a game engine developer who was used to building up these systems from first principles, and then would kind of their novelty would be applying it to more of a consumer facing app. And that was a good example of how we just didn’t get a lot of resonance with systems engineering, cause it’s not that many game engine developers out there, I guess, whereas we were able to find more plausible candidates with iOS engineer.

00:26:59 - Speaker 2: Yeah, and it’s probably the same for candidates as well, right, when you maybe apply somewhat speculatively to a job and you kind of think, oh, is this me, is this what I want to do? And then in the process of the conversation with the company and, you know, understanding better what the role would be, you kind of realize, ah, this isn’t quite what I’m looking for.

That’s fine. I think we all have to realize there is a mutual figuring out what are we looking for. Hopefully you go into the conversation, you’re serious and you’re not trying to waste anyone’s time by just fooling around, but it is also a discovery process.

Which naturally leads into the next phase here, which is what I usually call the phone screen, and this is something, it sounds like a very small process detail, but it’s something I’m quite passionate about because I feel that I have wasted a lot of my time and others’ time early on by having a more heavyweight interview right at the start because you can really read someone’s materials or see their online profile, maybe open source work, design portfolio, whatever, and just think, oh man, great fit.

This is gonna be great and you schedule the like 3 hour interview where they could come in and talk to several different people in the office and really, and I’ve been in the situation where it becomes pretty clear in the 1st 15 minutes that how I was picturing them is not how they are and it’s not a good fit, but now they’re kind of, especially when you talk about they’re in your office. Sort of already there and but it sure would be sort of pretty rude to just kind of end the interview and you sort of feel obligated.

So, the solution here, and again, it’s the same thing for the candidate on the other side, they may also discover pretty quickly that it’s not what they thought. And so the solution to that. as you keep that first contact just really low commitment, right? And so that’s the phone screen. It’s 20 to 30 minutes, 30 minutes tops. It’s a mutual respect for each other’s time. You’re there to make a human connection. I don’t need to hear all your background. I already read your thing. I don’t need you to demonstrate skills. I’m going to trust that what you wrote down is your skills are true, and the more proof of that will come a little later on. Right now we’re just making the human connection. Kind of getting some initial sense of who they are and how they communicate, they can ask me a few questions, things that are not clear on the roll, and then that’s the end of it, regardless of whether it was good or not, right? And if we make that habit of really brief screens, then you can basically do more of them. Holy, that’s good for both sides.

00:29:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, now I tend to call these introductory chats because they do think screen is very focused on implies filtering versus attraction. And I do do some basic filtering in these initial chats. My experience is that Basically asking a candidate to describe one thing they’ve worked on and then asking 2 to 3 follow-up questions gives you a very large amount of signal.

It’s enough signal in combination with the resume and what they wrote in their email to determine with a high degree of accuracy if they should move on to the next stage, which all you’re looking for is that if you promote them to the next stage, they’ll have like a 25 to 50% chance of passing that stage. And in my experience, I can basically dial that in with a few questions plus the resume. And then the rest of it is basically selling them on the company.

So again we’re under the presumption that the case we care about is The exceptional candidate. So if it’s not a great candidate, either you can tell that now or you eventually find out in the future, that kind of doesn’t really matter.

But for the exceptional candidate, you know, they’re gonna have multiple options and so you want to be basically beginning the selling process, which is like a hard sell. It’s more like you provide the opportunity for them to learn more about the company and the role, to ask questions, to establish that human connection, and you’re also beginning to understand what they value and want, like what you’re looking for in this role, what’s important to you. What’s your timeline, you know, more logistical stuff like compensation and location and travel, just trying to, you know, establish the baseline on which you’ll be basically selling this candidate in subsequent rounds.

And then I’m doing that throughout the recruiting process. Every time we speak with a candidate is an opportunity to help them understand if the company is a good fit. And by the way, it’s also an opportunity for them to understand if it’s not a good fit.

This is the thing that’s really important for me with recruiting. It’s about finding a mutual. Well fit, and I’m always really honest with candidates about that. I’ll tell them, I’m gonna help you understand if this is a good fit for you. And if it’s not, I’m gonna, you know, tell you. And, and a flip side, I’m even happy to help you find a job that is a good fit. You know, I know a bunch of other hiring managers in the industry. I can introduce you to them. That’s a very genuine offer that people have taken me up on. So I find that having that very congruent stance of, we’re here to find that this is an awesome job for you works well.

00:31:18 - Speaker 2: You mentioned here the 25% chance to go to the next stage or hopefully on the next stage, they have, you know, that chance of success. You can think of hiring as a funnel, same as a marketing funnel, where at each point, more and more people drop out and maybe again this is coming back to overemphasis on the filtering.

But one reason I do like that visualization a little bit is, once you’ve opened communication with someone, I feel a kind of sense of moral obligation is too strong, just say, like, through politeness, that now they should get a clean conclusion, right? We either get to going to the next stage and eventually that proceeds to a higher or at some point it’s OK, one or the other or both of us have determined it’s not a fit, the process is now over.

And one way to do this is just tooling and con on boards are a good way to do it where you have kind of a column for source and a column for introductory chat and a column for interview and whatever steps you have in your process, but part of what I like something like a trello or notion’s compound board for is there’s an automatic kind of date for the last update. And so it’s my personal opinion, you really shouldn’t let them set more than a week without an update. And again this is partially politeness, it’s partially a reflection of just you’re hiring in an industry where talent is in demand, and if you don’t keep that momentum up, they’ve got other opportunities. So I think a mistake I made at the very, very beginning of my hiring process, and I’ve seen lots of other hiring managers make is the solution for people you don’t want to continue with is you just ghost them. And of course that’s easier to do because it’s like sort of hard to write that email or whatever it is where you say, listen, based on what we know so far, this is a fit, so you know, good luck and everything. It’s kind of hard to write that email in a way, but I think you really owe it to them. Hopefully candidates feel that same way, if they decide, I’m taking another opportunity, or based on our last conversation, it’s not a fit, they can do the same thing.

00:33:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s not just a matter of politeness, it’s a matter of effectiveness. Here’s my number one tip for listeners of this podcast episode.

The most unreasonably effective thing to do in recruiting is to move quickly, especially as a small company where you have the ability to do that.

So for example, on these initial chats, if the candidate is obviously very strong, and I know that they’re going to move to the next stage, I’ll just tell them at the end of the call. This has gone great. We’d like to interview you, and I’m gonna send you an email right to this call to schedule it.

And likewise, you can do that on every step of the process.

Ideally, you try to do it the same day, like, so for example, if they have a starter project presentation, talk about the team meets, and you basically make a decision right there and you email him or her right then.

And often because of time zones or whatever it needs to be the next day, but I see all these companies, they take like a week to respond, and meanwhile, the candidate is like they’re hired, they’re starting at a new job, then they get this email a week later, you know, it’s like, we’re advancing you to the next stage. Well, that’s too bad.

00:34:14 - Speaker 2: Yeah, so then you’ve got kind of interviewing and pilot projects or starter projects, and I think interviewing is an area that has been given very extensive coverage by kind of blogs in our industry. So I don’t know how much time I want to spend on that, but I would be curious your take.

00:34:31 - Speaker 1: Well, it’s funny you say that because I think interviewing in our industry is like is completely broken and backwards, and there’s a bunch of cargo culting and mysticism and, you know, superstitions around interviewing, but there’s very little first principles thinking about what is effective. So I think it’s worth talking about.

00:34:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, my take is it’s a scaled up version of that introductory chat slash phone screen, just getting more in depth, really trying to understand what drives them, what they’ve spent their time on in the past, where they want to grow in their career.

And then telling them about your company, what the role is, and what the exact team is and what they would do there and trying to just get more and more, as you said, information for each side in order to just make it really obvious, wow, this is such a compelling fit everybody’s excited, let’s go forward, or yeah, to reveal that that fit just isn’t quite there. And that of course includes also the logistics that you already mentioned which is things like compensation and availability, right? It may be that you’re Really eager to hire someone basically right away, and there’s someone who says, well, you know, I’m on this project that’s wrapping at the end of the year and after that I’ll be thinking about a new thing or vice versa, maybe you’re on a longer cycle and obviously compensation is something that could vary really wildly, both cash equity. Basis on which it’s paid, you know, kind of salary versus freelance. Now you’ve got, you know, 4 day work weeks are becoming more popular, and, for example, in the Muse team, we have a mix of folks doing different total amounts of working time. So, you would just want to make sure all that makes sense and so it’s this constant exchange of information and you’re just trying to get the time necessary to get that exchange happening, as well as just finding that basic ability to communicate and whether you just sort of get along reasonably well. You don’t have to be best friends, but you do need to find a Good way to communicate and a good sense that you’re on the same page, and again, coming back to the shared values, shared working style, passion for the project area and so on.

00:36:32 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think that’s all good for the, what I would call the conversational piece of these interviews. I do also typically look for a sort of subject matter or skills piece of the interviews.

And here’s my theory on interviewing. The best predictor of future performance is recent performance doing the same thing, which sounds so simple, and then you have these multi-billion dollar companies doing interviews that have absolutely no relation to the actual job to be done.

So in order for me to get this information, I like to use two approaches. One, which is basically the interview and one is the pilot project that we’ll talk about. So with the interview, I do work history inquiries. Now, yes, you get some sense of work history from the resume, but often this is names of like companies and maybe projects, it’s very high level. So what I ask Canice to do is just describe to me. What you personally accomplished in your last one or maybe 2 jobs. And the thing is, the candidate know this question is coming, so everyone has prepared answer for the first question. The trick is you can’t prepare arbitrarily deep in the discussion tree. Just keep asking follow-up questions. OK, you said you solved the latency issue with the API. Tell me how you did that, right? What was the before and after, you know. Were you measuring the mean or median or percentiles, you know, why? And you just kind of keep going down. And my experience is that that’s extremely revealing on how a candidate operates and how effective that they’ve been. I mean, honestly, I’ve spoken with candidates who, they have a pretty nice looking resume, but you ask them about what they’ve personally accomplished in the past several years, and it’s kind of hard for them to come up with something specific. Meanwhile, sometimes you speak with candidates and there’s like knocking off stuff that they’ve done that they’ve personally accomplished, they help their team accomplish. It’s very concrete, it’s customer impacting, it’s business impacting, right? There’s all kinds of things they’ve done. So I find that that’s very effective on the interview piece. Now, the downside of that, going back to our original theory of interviewing is that that’s not gonna be exactly the same type of work and especially the same type of work environment as your company, and it is definitely a little in the past. So that’s where the pilot project approach comes in, which we’ll talk about next, I assume.

00:38:33 - Speaker 2: Indeed, if we should talk about the pilot project, which is, I think when I started doing these, and you and I certainly been doing them in our various shared ventures for well over a decade, maybe more like 15 years now, they were quite unusual. I got a lot of surprise both from candidates but also from others in our company who would say, well, it’s not the best way to do this, and it also costs you money, depending on how you do it.

But for me, it’s just absolutely the way to find out what it is really and truly like to work together.

There’s actually an older blog post on this just called 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Business. This is on the Thoughtbot blog, and they do this exact thing where they have the one week starter project, I think in their case, in their office. The basic concept here is that you kind of only get through so far in conversations, and I think everyone at this point knows that some kind of like faux demonstrations, whiteboard coding or whatever it is, whiteboard designing on the fly is probably not.

Very useful. So the pilot projects is the idea of we’re actually gonna hire you on a freelance basis. We found that 1 week is a pretty good period of time or 2 weeks part time.

This can be tricky if they’re currently employed, but I find it’s really worthwhile to just try to work with the candidates. To find a way to make it fit in, or we’re really going to hire you to join our team, come to our planning meeting, pick a thing to work on, work on it directly in our code base or design or marketing space or whatever the role is, and then at the end kind of present. What you learned.

And of course a week is not a ton of time at all, so there is a little bit of a rushed aspect to it, but you still learn a whole lot in that, and then we’ll pay you for that week, because we’ve actually hired you to do this work, and that should be just incredibly revealing on working chemistry and their real ability to get things done specifically to your point, specifically in your environment.

They may be really great at accomplishing something in a bigger company where they have a lot more resources and a little team like Muse, can they really roll up their sleeves? There’s not a lot of structure. You gotta figure it out yourself. Everyone does a little of everything. Some people thrive in that environment, others don’t.

But regardless, we want to s