Recruitment in Small Companies

I’m just after 7 hours of interviews in a row. Exhausting. Don’t try that at home. I know I should use smaller chunks. It would be better both for me and for candidates. Anyway I made it on purpose and I don’t regret although my brain is dead today.

I had some time to think about the way we interview and how it is connected with small size of our company. When you’re small you recruit much different than when you’re big. You don’t have evil HR team organizing the whole thing. Sometimes you struggle with not enough resumes. You can’t afford to make 6 interviews before hiring a person. It’s different.

How to deal with that?

1. Many to one interview model.
I usually take a colleague with me to have numerical advantage over a candidate. OK that’s really to have better coverage of merits on our side. And we sometimes ask similar questions so it limits redundant answers. After all we still can cross check our opinions. It also limits our needs when talking about meeting room reservations, which can be quite a pain in the ass.

2. One interview is enough.
We don’t have enough time to make numerous interviews so we stick with one meeting although we’re not religious when talking about interview time. We don’t pack it into an hour. Standard plan is hour and a half although, depending on the candidate, we can go longer. One interview is enough, one hour is not.

3. Do look where others don’t.
People suck at writing resumes. Yes, they should learn that but you can’t force them. But you can find real gems among poorly written resumes. That’s a hard work and most of poor papers are followed by poor candidates but that can be your chance.

4. Don’t waste the time.
As you don’t have your HR army recruitment takes your time. Time you could have spent on other tasks. Don’t waste it then. When you see there aren’t even a chance, end quick and go do something more useful. I can’t force myself to just end interview at the very moment I realize I waste the time. Instead I just ask a couple of finishing questions, which takes just a few minutes more. If you went out from my interview after a quarter, I’m sorry but your chances aren’t good.

5. Make it tough.
Make it nice, but tough. You have way less chances to evaluate a candidate, so make the test difficult. Other way you’ll be guessing, not deciding. And you don’t want to guess whether the candidate is worthy, do you?

6. Be honest.
You’ll probably get some questions from a candidate you’d rather not answer. Sure you have the choice. You can say the truth, color a bit the reality or just lie. Choose the answer number one. Be honest. You can lose a person who will go to another company but you won’t lose your credibility. And if you lied about important things he’d leave soon anyway. Personally I wouldn’t like to work for a liar.

7. Exploit your strengths.
Remember you’re small and you’re proud of that. If you don’t believe in that repeat it to yourself until you believe. Small companies are cool. You can always find a solution for any issue as far as you want it. You don’t have strict corporate rules. For some people it is a great plus. And for you having people who like your organization is even bigger plus. You won’t be big, but nothing should stop you to be cool and fair. You’ll find people who appreciate that.

Having said that, if you like to work in a small and cool company, remember we’re recruiting like crazy now. Feel free to ruin my day being one of those people who steal another couple of hours from my schedule and kill my brain during days like today. Hopefully your approach and knowledge will stun me and the day will be rescued. I will be more than happy. You can be sure.

Avoiding Hiring Mistakes: Plan Recruitment Ahead

If you need to recruit a developer or two to a project which is just about to start in 6 weeks, well, you’re late. Way too late. You’ve screwed that one. If you’re finalizing a big contract and have no idea which PM would take it and you consider hiring another one, well, you’re late. Way too late.

Depending on law regulations and level of experience you look for recruitment process will take somewhere between 2 and 5 months. Count another 3 to 6 months for hired person to gather required company-specific knowledge and then finally you can expect them to show full potential.

Recruitment can’t be reactive. It has to be proactive. In other case you not only recruit under pressure of time but also don’t give your hires a chance to prepare them sufficiently. Nine times of ten it just won’t work well.

Whole avoiding hiring mistakes series.

Avoiding Hiring Mistakes: Listen to Questions

At the end of the interview you ask a sacramental question: “Do you want to ask us any questions?” Now, it’s time for a candidate.

Listen what questions are asked. Usually the more questions you hear the better. Sure, sometimes you’ll be killed with a number or type of questions and then it doesn’t help the candidate any more. Anyway, generally it works.

Another important thing is what exactly you’re asked about. It happened several times I had quite an insightful discussion about our products or our market with a candidate and it was always a sign of interviewee’s real interest in a job. It also tells you something about their knowledge and approach.

As often, there’s no silver bullet here, but when you listen carefully you will find at least a couple of hints when you are asked questions on interview.

Whole avoiding hiring mistakes series.

Avoiding Hiring Mistakes: Be Ready to Break Schemas

Have you ever met a candidate who seemed perfect but for a different position? Have you ever interviewed a newbie with great potential when you looked for experienced person? Have you ever talk with person who could work only part-time while you needed a full-timer?

You probably have.

And what was your decision?

You could follow the schema, rejecting the candidate as it wasn’t the choice you aimed for. Or better, you could break the schema and try to find the place for a talent. You could look for another team when he could suit. You could dedicate more effort to learn her basics before throwing her into deep water. You could adjust requirements a bit to include part-timers. Or maybe, just maybe, you already had way too much talent in your team.

Whole avoiding hiring mistakes series.

Avoiding Hiring Mistakes: Read Between Lines

You are on the interview. You ask. You make notes. Knows what critical path is. Plus. Has the idea how to organize a small project. Plus. Gantt charts have eaten him from the hand. Plus. Yawn. Risk management isn’t one of strengths. Minus. Would deal nicely with tough situations in projects. Plus. Etc.

Is that all? No. So far you know nothing about character of the person and how he will interact with the rest of the team. Sure you will ask about three strengths and three weaknesses but it won’t really tell you much. How the get the knowledge then? Have some soft questions which allow candidate to talk more not necessarily focusing about merits. Then read between lines.

If you ask about the most interesting project and you hear about another simple database application it tells you something about creativity. When you ask how the candidate deals with issues he can’t resolve by himself only the first idea is to go ask the boss you can imagine how self-reliant the guy is. The less obvious questions you have the more you are able to find in answers. Between lines.

Whole avoiding hiring mistakes series.

Avoiding Hiring Mistakes: Prepare to the Interview

It is told so many times that interviewees should prepare themselves before coming to the meeting. That’s obvious. However interviewers way too often don’t consider the situation as they have their homework too.

When you’re about to hire someone and you go to the recruitment meeting without much preparation you lower your chances for good judgment. You won’t ask right questions. You won’t have ideas how to exploit candidate’s background. You won’t know which areas you should focus on. You won’t know so many things you’ll probably waste both your and candidate’s time.

Preparation should cover at least two areas. The list of questions and candidate’s resume. Candidate’s resume is quite obvious – you need to know who you talk to. The list of questions should be wide and possibly crafted a bit for candidate’s profile – you can never be sure where the discussion would go. Anyway you should be prepared to talk wherever it goes. Yes, that does mean you won’t ask a half or even more of your questions, but still it’s worth the effort. The nice thing is, that the more you talk with candidates the less you need to spend to prepare to another interview.

Whole avoiding hiring mistakes series.

Avoiding Hiring Mistakes: Avoid Time Pressure

The worst scenario of recruitment is when you have to make a decision very quick. Yes, sometimes it’s not possible to wait, but remember time is a bad advisor here. Usually investing time into going through another few interviews brings better results.

People generally suck in writing their resumes, so chances are good you overlook a gem in a sea of applications (if you’re fortunately enough to have the sea of applications). And when you talk about position when there’s limited number of candidates why not to talk with them all?

Another thing, you’ll probably get a couple of good papers not just after you’ve published your job ad but later. These are usually people who doesn’t have to find any job very quickly but those who just try to move themselves further as professionals. Usually not only they have good papers but they’re good employees after all.

Having said all of that, sometimes you will meet a sure shot. Someone who you know you want to employ a second after the interview. Then just go for it. Don’t be a slave to schedule either way.

Whole avoiding hiring mistakes series.

Avoiding Hiring Mistakes: Internships Stupid!

When you look for inexperienced candidates it’s much harder to correctly judge their potential. Usually you won’t find a number of clues in resume, because if there were many of them it wouldn’t be an inexperienced candidate. Probably it will be hard to talk for very long about merits because, you know, you talk with the person without much experience. It’s quite possible you’ll have some doubts and it was told doubts mean no hire.

Anyway there’s other way. Internship is different relationship than typical job. When intern leaves after a month it has much smaller impact on the team when regular employee leaves after three months of probation. Internship is also cheaper. Management has no stress when interns do something not very important, while it’s much harder to convince bosses when you talk about regular employees.

Personally, I prefer to offer one-month internships. Our cost is mostly time of intern’s guide and most of the time there’s quite a good return on that investment. On the other hand a month is enough to see person’s attitude and learning curve which are two most important factors when you think about inexperienced candidates. With internships you can catch nuggets, which would be very hard to find other way.

Whole avoiding hiring mistakes series.

Avoiding Hiring Mistakes: Trust Your Intuition

When you interview a candidate remember you have this ancient strange thing called intuition. Use it. And don’t be afraid to use intuition as an argument to support your decision about the candidate (no matter if it’s positive or negative). As far as you think consciously about intuition it’s as good source of feedback as anything else. Having to very similar candidates it would be probably the most important factor I’d base my decision on.

That’s definitely much easier for women as they use intuition naturally in many situations but I encourage all to follow above advice when hiring. It can be a really good indicator. I admit to use intuition quite often when hiring and so far I can’t complain. And really, I’m not a woman. I’ve checked it. Twice.

Whole avoiding hiring mistakes series.

Avoiding Hiring Mistakes: Flow With Interview

You go there, to yet another interview with a potential developer. It’s eight one this week and it appears you’ll have to go through another dozen until you find someone who suits your team. Obviously you start with the list of standard question, but you should listen carefully to answers you get. Chances are good the interviewee will give you at least a couple of hacks you can exploit to push the discussion to different areas. Possibly these would be areas where you can find real value of the candidate or check several soft skills you’d like to know about.

It can be really anything. Often one of those hack-points I use is a question about the most interesting project candidate participated in. Sometimes in ends on discussing how the map in computer game should be prepared, sometimes we talk about challenges you face as an administrator of sport vortal and sometimes you discuss project management tricks which can be used when you face tough client on the other side.

There’s one more profit here. Besides of gathering the knowledge about the candidate you can learn something new.

Whole avoiding hiring mistakes series.

Avoiding Hiring Mistakes: Dig Deep

When you start an interview you most likely have a list of questions. You write pluses and minuses or give points for every answer, but what do you do when the candidate shoots all the good answers? You just go to another point on the list?

I prefer to do it the way my mathematician did in the secondary school. “Well, that’s the right answer, how about going a bit deeper? Still correct... Do you know the law you’ve used here? You can... Can you prove the law? Oh, you can’t. No A this time. Sorry.” When you check one’s knowledge in specific area you won’t really know how deep the knowledge is unless you touch its borders. It has nothing to do with looking for holes in interviewees’ knowledge or trying to point their place. You just want to know what you’re going to pay for.

When you just go through standard questions prepared for average candidates you’re going to end with hires just a bit above the average if you’re lucky. You should rather seek for far better than average.

Whole avoiding hiring mistakes series.

Doubts Mean No Hire Supplement

I’ve just started a new recruitment series and my friend Piotr (who I’ve learned a lot from, especially when talking about management) has already started complaining that I’m wrong. I think I should add a disclaimer to the last tip (doubts mean no hire): this relates to standard full-time job offers. When you think about internships you don’t have to be so strict, although if you have a comfort of choice, keep your standards high.

Avoiding Hiring Mistakes: Doubts Mean No Hire

I think that’s one of the most important rules. When you’re in doubt if the candidate suits you fine it does mean no hire. I believe there are people out there who are valuable although they aren’t able to sell themselves during an interview and after all they’d appear to be great hires. Unfortunately I met none of them. On the other hand I met dozens of people who were hired despite doubts and they’ve proven the decision to be wrong.

It doesn’t really matter which area doesn’t suit you well. Maybe the guy is perfect when talking about his technical skills but red lights appear when he becomes overly curious before even the decision is made. Maybe the girl doesn’t show much will to unwind herself. Possibly the candidate is willing to learn but the starting point is, well, way too low. Or you just feel under your skin something is wrong with the applicant. When in doubt say no.

It sounds harsh but it works.

Whole avoiding hiring mistakes series.

Avoiding Hiring Mistakes Series

You can already find here recruitment tips series and a description of hiring mistakes types. I guess it is good time to share some advices how hiring mistakes can be avoided. I’ll post a new tip every week and they all will be listed here.

Doubts mean no hire
Dig deep
Flow with interview
Trust your intuition
Internships stupid!
Avoid time pressure
Prepare to the interview
Read between lines
Be ready to break schemas
Listen to questions
Plan recruitment ahead

Hiring Mistakes

I like recruiting new people to my teams. I boldly think I’m not so bad at that. I admit to a list of hiring mistakes and I’ve seen many more. What I call hiring mistakes? Here are a few categories:

• Toxic. High skills connected with either toxic character or primaballerina habits. Those people look perfectly when you discuss merits during interview, but somehow they’re never team players after all. This is a tough one, because from one perspective the person is very valuable. On the other hand harming team work can never be justified by high skills.

• Theoretician. Read all the books on programming. Knows all the theory. Never written a bigger piece of code for a demanding customer. Quite often (but not always) these are people with university background. Very challenging in discussion but tendency to dig through all theoretically possible methods and lack of practical knowledge frustrates those who work close with him.

• Unable. No skill. No will to learn. No use for a team. Three times no. A dead end.

• No potential. You don’t always look for people with a complete skill set. Sometimes you look for one who will learn all things over time and then will become a fully-blown professional. And sometimes you end up with somebody who doesn’t have potential to achieve that. A dead end as above, but it takes more time to figure it out. Sometimes that’s just wrong career path set by a candidate and she can be moved to a position which would work better for both sides.

• Uncommitted. Good skill set. Good-natured personality. Yet somehow never committed or accountable driving team morale down every time people has to give a bit more from themselves. Can ruin team chemistry and atmosphere.

Do you know more?

Eliminator Questions during Job Interview

Two sources made me thinking about recruitment process once again. One was Rowan Manahan with his post about eliminator questions. Another was a series of interviews with potential summer interns I had last days.

Rowan lists several questions which, if answered badly, can ruin your chances for a hire. On his personal list you can find:

• Telling about your career

• Telling something negative about you

• Giving reason why you should be hired

• Questions you ask

I asked myself if I can make a similar list in my case. I followed my last interviews with potential interns and I can’t make similar blacklist as Rowan. I can’t think about any single question which answered poorly can ruin chances of the interviewee. On the other hand, it’s possible to ruin the chances giving really poor answer for any of questions.

There’s another area where I can’t consider myself as a typical interviewer, described by Rowan, as I usually start with a positive (not neutral) attitude to the candidate. When I recall my last recruitment meetings I try to enter the room with a slight will to hire the person. This helps me to create friendly atmosphere and (I hope) moves some pressure out of the candidate.

I think that’s fair. You have never a chance to make the first impression for the second time and interviewees are stressed, they want it or not, when they meet you at the very first meeting. And no, I don’t have a problem with overrating people. With some experience in that field you’ll easily recognize all yellow or red lights which appear – you don’t need eliminator questions here. I rather try to be sensitive on specific phrases which can be heard all over the conversation which can be translated into “Don’t hire me.”

I’m curious if you have your eliminator questions and, if yes, what can be found there.

Reading and Learning

One of questions I often use during interviews with developers and alike is: “What newsgroups, blogs etc you read on a regular basis?“ And so very often I hear that none of them. This is one of the questions which differentiate those, who have a strong drive to learn, from those who have not.

I don’t say it’s bad, it isn’t really. If you want to stay wherever you are and you don’t feel urge to improve, that’s perfectly OK. On the other hand if you try, like most of people, to build some kind of career path for you, learning is essential. And personally it’s hard to find another easily accessible, constantly updated, keeping its finger on the pulse source of information from any area than the Web. It’s all here, why not to use that?

Oh, maybe I shouldn’t moan? I shouldn’t be surprised. On general, people don’t like to learn unless they’re forced to do so. I just prefer to work with minority, which is different. “Nothing easier,” you’ll say, “go and hire them.”

And you’ll be right.

The Rule of Hiring

There’s one rule I obey when hiring people. When I have any doubts, the decision is “no hire.”

I’ve seen several times hires which were made, even though there were some doubts. It was never a very good decision. Just a good one if we were very lucky. On the other hand, I don’t remember any situations when we were sure the one would suit us and, at the end of the day, it appeared that we were wrong.

Sure, you’ll never meet the perfect candidate, but it doesn’t matter when you feel the person will be good. Trust yourself. You’ll know. You’ll feel.

Recruitment Tips: Don’t Be Overconfident

I had a really bad day today. Three of my today’s interviews were waste of time. And I mean complete waste of time. I’ve learnt not to be very attached to what people are writing in their papers. They lie, no matter how hard you try to discourage them to do it. That was to be expected today.

Thing which wasn’t expected was candidates’ level of confidence or rather overconfidence I should say. When someone rates himself for 4 out of 6 in particular technology and doesn’t answer for any question it makes me suspicious because I don’t like to be lied. However, when I hear that someone rates himself 7 out of 6 I expect he should be able to recite whole darn help. And when he doesn’t answer correctly for any question, and I mean any single question, it doesn’t make me suspicious. It makes me angry. He wastes my darn precious time.

In most cases being overconfident ends up with etiquette of liar glued to your back. I guess you don’t need this kind of stuff when you look for a job. It’s much better tactic to rate yourself fairly low – you’ll start with easy questions, but as far as you’ll be able to answer them you can be sure that you’ll have a chance to answer another one.

Believe me, I hired quite a lot of people who rated themselves lower than I’d rate them. On the other hand I can’t find anyone who was overconfident and ended up with the job.

Whole recruitment tips series

Recruitment Tips: Do What You Are Asked For

Yes, I’m still recruiting. Currently trying to find good candidates on several different positions. It’s always bigger mess when I receive papers from people applying for different positions. I always work with candidates for one position at the very moment. Predicting that I always ask to add a reference number in a subject field of an e-mail.

You know what? About one fourth of papers come without the darn reference number in the darn subject field. I don’t get it. It’s like saying: “I ask you to hire me, but I don’t really care about your time. It’s all about me.”

When someone asks candidates to do something special it probably isn’t done without a purpose. Denying to cooperate is usually an easy way to bring one’s chances close to zero. I know I’m saying obvious things, but hey, someone sent me those darn papers without any reference number, right?