Work Rules!

02Stop Hiring Based on Gut Feelings

Recruiting is universally acknowledged as the most important function of any business, yet almost everyone does it completely wrong. Let us examine the traditional hiring process. A manager needs to fill a role, so they post a generic job description, skim through a pile of exaggerated resumes, and invite a few candidates in for an interview. During the interview, the manager asks vague questions like, "What is your biggest weakness?" or "Where do you see yourself in five years?" After thirty minutes of pleasant conversation, the manager makes a decision based entirely on their gut feeling. They hire the person they’d most like to have a beer with. Laszlo Bock points out that this approach is not just flawed; it is statistically useless. Research shows that unstructured interviews predict less than fourteen percent of an employee's actual performance. You would almost be better off flipping a coin. To build an extraordinary team, you have to completely overhaul how you find and evaluate talent. The first rule of hiring is that you must only hire people who are better than you in some meaningful way. If you are a brilliant marketer, you should hire someone who is better at data analytics than you are. If you are a great strategist, hire someone who is a master of execution. Most managers are terrified of doing this because they feel threatened by top talent. They consciously or subconsciously hire B-players so that they can remain the smartest person in the room. This leads to a catastrophic phenomenon known as the "bozo explosion," where B-players hire C-players, and C-players hire D-players, until the entire company is dragged down into mediocrity. You must fight this instinct with everything you have. A great hire should make you slightly uncomfortable because they challenge your thinking and push you to elevate your own game. How do you actually identify these top performers? You have to abandon the unstructured interview and embrace science. Google relies heavily on structured interviewing and work sample tests. Structured interviewing means that you ask every single candidate for a specific role the exact same set of predetermined questions, and you grade their answers using a standardized rubric. This eliminates the massive cognitive biases that plague human decision-making. We all suffer from confirmation bias; if a candidate walks in and we immediately like their firm handshake or the fact that they went to the same college we did, we spend the rest of the interview asking easy questions to confirm our initial positive impression. Structured interviews force you to evaluate everyone on a level playing field. Work sample tests are even more powerful. Instead of asking someone to tell you how they would solve a problem, you actually give them a piece of work similar to what they would do on the job and see how they perform. If you are hiring a software engineer, have them write some code. If you are hiring a customer service representative, have them handle a mock angry customer call. Past behavior and actual performance are infinitely better predictors of future success than smooth talking in a conference room. One of the most radical changes Google made to its hiring process was taking the final decision away from the hiring manager. This sounds completely counterintuitive. Should the manager not have the final say on who joins their team? Bock argues absolutely not. Hiring managers are inherently biased. They are usually desperate to fill an open role because their team is overworked, which means they are willing to lower the bar just to get a warm body into a seat. To solve this, Google uses independent hiring committees. The interviewers write detailed notes and scores, and then a completely separate committee reviews the data to make the final decision. The committee does not care if the manager is stressed; their only job is to protect the quality of the company's talent pool. Investing heavily in recruiting is the smartest financial decision a company can make. Most organizations spend the vast majority of their human resources budget on training and development, trying to turn average employees into great ones. This is incredibly difficult and often yields poor results. Google flips the model: they spend an exorbitant amount of time and money on the front end, ensuring they only bring in spectacular people. When you hire the right people, training becomes mostly about giving them the tools they need and getting out of their way. The lesson here is simple but profound: never compromise on hiring. If it takes six months to find the perfect candidate, you wait six months. A bad hire will cost you exponentially more in time, money, and team morale than an empty desk ever could.

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