Seth’s Blog: The end of the job interview

Seth’s Blog: The end of the job interview:

Let’s assert that there are two kinds of jobs you need to fill:

The first kind of job is a cog job. A job where you need someone to perform a measurable task and to follow instructions. This can range from stuffing envelopes to performing blood tests. It’s a profitable task if the person is productive, and you need to find a reliable, skilled person to do what you need.

The second kind of job requires insight and creativity. This job relies on someone doing something you could never imagine in advance, producing outcomes better than you had hoped for. This might include a sales job, or someone rearranging the factory floor to increase productivity. It could also include a skilled craftsperson or even a particularly skilled receptionist.

There is a third type of a job — one with factors of both. Joining a programming team, for instance, requires you have become one cog in a group of cogs; but in a way that requires a degree of innovation and creativity at the same time. It’s a much different beast than, say, line manufacturing (necessary job skills, little to no innovation).

If you’re hiring for the first kind of job, exactly why are you sitting a nervous candidate down in your office and asking her to put on some sort of demonstration in her ability to interact with strangers under pressure? Why do you care what his suit looks like or whether or not he can look you in the eye?

The interview serves multiple masters. Going beyond the “can this person do the job” is “does this person fit in to our organization? (or culture, or ethics, or….).

And if you’re hiring for the second kind of job, the question becomes even more interesting. Would you marry someone based on a one hour interview in a singles bar? And how does repeating the forced awkwardness of an interview across your entire team help you choose which people are going to do the extraordinary work you’re banking on?

Well, for one, getting more eyes on a problem makes it more likely you get the right answer to it. It also makes it more likely that the team has some idea whether this person is compatible with the team or not, and honestly, I think the group dynamics are more important; you can usually find multiple candidates for a job, but the chore is finding the one that’ll fit in and improve your team (or at least, avoid the ones that’ll make the team unhappy and miserable).

There’s a second, more important reason for running a candidate past the team. Not only is that candidate selling themselves to you — you’re selling yourself to that candidate. And they should be able to meet enough of the team to get a feel for whether this is a place THEY want to work. Interviews are (or should be) a bi-directional sales job.

At least half the interview finds the interviewer giving an unplanned and not very good overview of what the applicant should expect from this job. Unlike most of the marketing communications the organization does, this spiel is unvetted, unnatural and unmeasured. No one has ever sat down and said, “when we say X, is it likely the applicant understands what we mean? Are we putting our best foot forward? Does it make it more likely that the right people will want to work here, for the right reasons?” [tell the truth, do you test your job interview spiel the same way you test your web results or even your direct mail?]

Please, god, no. The more “professional” the presentation is, the more I wonder what they’re hiding; I expect that from someone trying to get me to sell vitamins, not an engineering manager talking over a technical position. You make me feel like I’m at a presentation for a vacation timeshare, I’m outta there. Sorry, I’m trying to get a feel for a job and the people I’ll be working with; not investing in the company’s stock.

So, what should you do instead?

Glad you asked!

Every applicant gets a guided tour of your story. Maybe from a website or lens or DVD. Maybe from one person in your organization who is really good at this. It might mean a plant tour or watching an interview with the CEO. It might involve spending an hour sitting in one of your stores or following one of your doctors around on her rounds. But it’s a measurable event, something you can evaluate after the process is over. If you’re hiring more than a few people a week, clearly it’s worth having a full-time person to do this task and do it well.

Good Lord, you’re taking the kind of thing done when a company interviews a half dozen ad agencies to see which one gets awarded the account, and trying to roll it out to all job interviews. (hint: ask the board of directors at Burger King how well agency reviews work….)

There are no one-on-one-sit-in-my-office-and-let’s-talk interviews. Boom, you just saved 7 hours per interview. Instead, spend those seven hours actually doing the work. Put the person on a team and have a brainstorming session, or design a widget or make some espressos together. If you want to hire a copywriter, do some copywriting. Send back some edits and see how they’re received.

If you want me to do REAL work — then hire me as a contractor. contract-to-hire is a time-honored tradition. but asking a candidate to come in and contribute to a real project? I don’t think so. And honestly, I think in the technical area, most corporate lawyers would have a cow, interview-NDAs notwithstanding. For good reason.

And then good luck finding any team where you can get a majority of the members together for a significant block of time; I happen to think the group interview (2-3 members vs. a candidate) has some practical use as well as 1 on 1, but the primary reason I think most teams do the sequence of individual interviews is that it’s the only way to get people to see the candidate and work it in around the rest of their schedule. Real life doesn’t stop just because someone’s coming in for an interview.

This also seems to preclude another kind of common interview: peer group and dotted-line group interviews. Unless you’re in a monastery, whatever group you go to work for is working with other groups on projects; it’s very useful (in a bi-directional way) to spend time talking to people from these other organizations and get a feel for the larger picture (and personalities).

Now, these kinds of brainstorming sessions and discussions are great — in more general terms. One of the interviews I’ve had recently was with the manager of one of the groups the position would be working with; it turned into an hour about HIS problems and challenges, and some serious technical geeking on how my technical challenges were going to make his life better (or more miserable). I came away with a much wider appreciation for the situation and how it fit into the bigger picture. It got very technical, but ultimately, it was a sales job on why working well with his systems was crucial; he, hopefully came away with both a feeling that I could do it, and that I understood why he was so worried about it…

If the person is really great, hire them. For a weekend. Pay them to spend another 20 hours pushing their way through something.

First, this probably isn’t practical on any number of levels; Right up front, people employed by another company may well have no-compete or no-contracting/consulting clauses in their work agreements. There are tax issues: are you going to W-2 them? 10-99 them? Pay them under the table? At what rate? I’m guessing right now Seth’s lawyers and HR people want him dead; he’s taken the “come work for us” dance, and moved it to the front of the interview sequence where you dance it with every serious candidate, not just the final one.

This may well work for the kind of environment Seth lives in — small, focussed office. It fails horribly at larger companies. Imagine Yahoo, or Apple, or Microsoft. Imagine having to hire 1,000 people in a quarter, and having to work out the 10-99 paperwork on 4 people per position, along with NDAs and all of the legal requirements that go for hiring someone for, oh, 20 hours. Your HR person will spend that much time just getting stuff ready. Now imaging how happy Apple would be finding out that a current employee is also working at Microsoft (even if ti’s a long weekend, while on vacation — Seth, exactly how do you propose these things be made to work for people who actually try to find a new job before leaving their old one?)

Ultimately, Seth is putting new and really unreasonable burdens on the job seeker. I know what I’d do. I’d walk. Seth’s new model seems to assume people are basically in contractor/consultant mode anyway. In the real world, most people grab a few hours here and a few hours there to interview around their real job — taking out 20 hours to sit with a team and “do real stuff” isn’t gonna happen; their CURRENT employer’s likely to notice and get honked. Frankly, I’m not sure it improves the process for the hiring company, either; it really DOES feel like he’s simply trying to take the advertising agency design review model and move it into individual hiring; and if you want how often companies hire (and then get pissed off at and fire) advertising and design agencies, it’s a horribly flawed process as well.

Yes, people change after you hire them. They always do. But do they change more after an unrealistic office interview or after you’ve actually watched them get in the cage and tame a lion?

The reality is, some people can game the interview system; companies need to be aware of that, and when it happens, recognize it quickly and cut their losses and move on (unfortunately, most companies seem really unwilling to do so, making a small mistake a much bigger one over time by letting the problem sit there and fester).

Seth’s making a few mistakes in assumptions here: first, that the current system is broken (it ain’t perfect, but nothing is). Second, he seems to not notice that he’s asking a hiring team to commit a LOT of time to the hiring process; can you imagine any team taking 5-6 people, and committing them to 4 or 5 20 hour blocks working with candidates? (and we’ll ignore the meta-resources his setup requires, like HR, payroll, admin staff, etc, etc).

And what’s in all this for the prospective employee, anyway? why should they even remotely want to play this game? And how does it help the prospective employee decide this is the job they want?

(linkers to here:

Gregbo: Note for usenet fans: Chuq von Rospach, one of the major contributors to usenet source code and newsgroup organization back in the day [[boy, I haven't been called THAT in a long time....]]

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