"Hire" doesn't mean hire
I’m currently in the process of hiring engineers at Jitty because we actually need people. That got me thinking about the hiring process and all the mistakes I’ve made over the years, including making the wrong decisions to hire people. There are myriad failures in every hiring process, even the good ones, but the biggest failure of all is interpreting “hire” feedback from an interview as meaning you should hire someone.
For the most part in interviews you’ll be asked to give feedback on the candidate, but regardless of all the feedback it’ll usually boil down to a choice of one of these ratings:
- Strong Hire
- Hire
- No Hire
- Strong No Hire
The easiest ones to decide on are Strong Hire and Strong No Hire.
Occasionally you’ll get a candidate who just blows you out of the water and you would seriously love to work with this person. They hit all the notes you’re looking for in the role, and they’d be a great team fit too. They’re your Strong Hires, and I reckon they account for about 5% of all the candidates you’ll ever interview. Maybe 10% if you’ve got really good sourcing and screening.
You’ll also occasionally get candidates who you simply cannot imagine working with under any circumstances. There’s the rare person who got to this stage who is just completely incompetent. Then there are the candidates who come out with some racist or sexist or ableist comment that stuns you momentarily. You take a sideways glance at the other interviewers to confirm they really said that. They did. Those are your Strong No Hires, and they account for about 5% of candidates.
That leaves 85-90% of the people you’ll interview in either Hire or No Hire, and it can often be really hard to tell which is which because with the limited time available you don’t get enough signal to be sure. If you were sure the rating would have “Strong” in front of it. A lot of interviewers will give candidates the benefit of the doubt and say “hire”, especially as they often think about it in the more disconnected “this person would be okay on some other team” rather than “I would want this person on my team”.
You have to change the way you think about the hire ratings.
“Hire” does not mean “I think we should hire this person”, it actually means:
“I am not against hiring this person”
“Strong Hire” does not mean “They performed really well”, it actually means:
“I am an advocate for this candidate and I will be severely disappointed if we don’t hire them.”
The difference is crucial. If you go through an interview loop and everyone says “Hire” but they were all on the fence and gave the candidate the benefit of the doubt, you could translate that into an actual hire and have someone join that nobody really wanted in the first place. I’ve seen it happen time and time again, and while sometimes these people work out well, often they aren’t great.
You might be tempted to fix this by changing your scorecard options to add a “Neutral” rating or drop “Hire” entirely. But that doesn’t fix anything because Hire and Neutral should be treated the same way in practice, and removing Hire just forces “yes, but…” interviewers to artificially inflate their score to Strong Hire to get someone through. The standard ratings are fine; you just need better definitions.
In any interview loop I run, I have two rules which help to avoid the accidental hire problem:
- At least half of the interviewers must have said Strong Hire
- No interviewer has said No Hire
I will also usually ask anybody who has said Strong Hire to pitch why we should hire the candidate to confirm they really mean Strong Hire.
That means candidates can go through an interview loop at Jitty, get a “Hire” rating from everyone, and still not be offered a role. It sucks, because sometimes the candidate did well in all the interviews, and you don’t even have much constructive feedback to give other than as a group the interviewers weren’t positive enough or didn’t get enough signal.
That’s life though.
Interviewing is a horribly flawed process at the best of times, but at least if you follow this approach you’ll err on the side of not hiring, which is better than making a bad hire. Or even an adequate one.
