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« The History of American Psychology Museum | Main | The power of context for personality and job performance »
When right is wrong: hiring people quickly
On September 30, 2005 by Jamie Madigan
I recently came across this story on Software By Rob, which gives tips for hiring technical people very quickly. It's easy to get in a state of mind where you cite academic research, best practices, and the "right way" to hire people. This usually involves intensive and time-consuming job analysis, building and polishing technical interviews, creation or purchase of aptitude or ability tests, validation of those tests, training for test administrators, and four or five other things. It's by the book.
In many situations, though, that kind of approach will lead to ruination. For example, I spent a few years working in an Internet-based startup company where we grew very quickly. Er... Then we laid a bunch of people off and grew quickly again. Laid off some more. But in those growth periods, we needed people now and many of them were in newly minted jobs where there were no current incumbents or even specific job duties. And if we didn't get those people, it meant we were probably going to fail and the organization as a whole would die off.
According to the article on Software By Rob, hiring fast in these kinds of situations involves five things:
- Write the Shortest Job Description Ever
- Skim Resumes Like Crazy
- Use the Numbers
- Hold Phone Interviews
- Finish In-Person
There's a lot of reasonable advice there if you don't have time or resources to do things the "right" way. And in fact, looking back over the way I handled those frantic hires at that Internet startup, I ended up doing a lot of the same ways. I wrote terse job descriptions, I skimmed resumes looking for basic experiences and qualifications, I did a lot of brief but structured phone interviews, I sorted people into "buckets" based on their quality as a candidate, and I invited a few people in for face-to-face interviews just to make sure they weren't some kind of total freaks.
It wasn't a perfect system, and I could have probably kicked up the utility of the whole thing with a simple cognitive ability test or more rigorous screening, but it worked as well as it had to.
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