Startup Hiring

Hiring is an area which is usually given a lot of lip service but neglected in practice. Especially in a startup, where there is a shortage of workforce, hiring at all levels has a profound impact on the future of the organization. When compared to a big organization, the value proposition of a startup to its employees is concerning speed, freedom, and responsibility. But, when it comes to hiring, startups adopt the cookie cutter hiring strategy of big companies.

The regular interview process is biased toward extroverts and people who can speak well. In my opinion and observation, this does not correlate to someone who is good at what she does. I have been observing this since my college days. During campus placements, flamboyant and boisterous students made their way into companies while the quiet ones who were good at studies and who could get along with others were often overlooked. The same thing happens to a lesser extent with the regular interview process too.

Taleb says the following of doers.

For those who do things, it is harder to talk about what they do. Reality doesn’t care about talk. It is full of pauses and hesitations. Clear, non-hesitant speech is the domain of non-doers.

Interviewing is an intimidating experience, and not a lot of people excel in this, especially people who are good at what they do. Also, the kind of questions that are asked during an interview has hardly any resemblance to the day to day work. I have written about this before too. A big step in this direction is to craft an interview process that mimics your organization’s day to day tasks. The best way to do this is to have an assignment based interview process. You can create assignments that resemble tasks that you do on a daily basis and ask candidates to work their way through this. An approach of this sort takes the whole adversarial, and interrogative tone out of interviews and makes it an enjoyable experience.

An important aspect to take care while creating an interview process is to take subjectivity out of interviews. Who conducts the interview should not have a bearing on the outcome of the interview. Another thing to keep in mind is to subject all candidates of a particular level to the same questions. Following the above ensures that you are evaluating every candidate on the same yardstick. It is essential to do this to create a quantitative interview process. This sort of standardization also helps in creating a checklist of what you expect in answers to questions. If you have these covered, anyone can take anyone’s interview and evaluate candidates. Is it not ironic that startups claim to be data-driven, but when it comes to interviews, the whole data-driven approach takes a corner seat.

An example interview template would be to have an assignment that closely resembles a task related to work. Try to keep the assignment practical yet straightforward. A good candidate should not take more than 3 to 4 hours to complete the assignment. On submission; evaluate the assignment on code quality, conventions, comments, instructions to run, test cases, boundary condition handling, error handling, and documentation. Post that, have a phone screen with a bunch of questions that mostly have a one-word answer. Make this as practical and broad as possible. Try to touch all aspects of work from data structure choices to computational complexity to databases, web servers, etc. The idea here is that if someone is good at what they do, they should be able to answer these without any preparation. Then invite the candidate for face to face round where you ask the candidate to expand on the take-home assignment. Add a bit more complexity and see how the candidate fares. Finish off the entire process with a design round. I have presented a very rough template, tweak it, add more rounds and improvise to fit your needs; every organization is different.

Along with all the above, soft skills are critical. The sad fact is a lot of people do not know how to conduct interviews. I have heard of instances where interviewers were rude and outright obnoxious, not punctual, candidates not kept informed in advance of the interview schedule, candidates not being adequately attended during the face to face rounds, etc. All these play a significant role in shaping the image of the organization in the candidate’s mind.

In the talent market, big companies, as well as startups, are competing for the same piece of the pie. By adopting a hiring process similar to big companies, startups are not going to get an ace up their shoulder. What startups should be focussing on is coming up with a flexible hiring process that is unique to their organization. It is not easy to execute this in a big corporation but very much doable in a startup. Starting from how you engage with a candidate for the first time to the interview to the offer rollout process, everything is ripe for disruption. Differentiate yourself from others. An interview is a big opportunity for you to make a mark on the candidate, seize it right there.