Another post with ‘another’ in the title, this one on hiring

health and lifestyle — by TDavid @ 8:20 pm PST

I just realized that my last two post titles started with ‘another’ so I thought, why not make it a trifecta.

The writing here this past week has been a little leaner than normal, because I’ve been spending a lot of time in my Second Life. That virtual world interests me lately more than what’s happening in the real tech world despite such anticipated events as CES 2006. We are planning on being at CES 2007, BTW, just decided to sit this one out. With Vista and Office 12 and PS3 and Nintendo Revolution all on the docket by next CES, that show I think will blow away this year.

And since today from 7am to noon the Second Life crew were upgrading the grid and software that gave me a little more time to get outside and see all the good stuff I’ve been missing.

CES 2006 seemed like a good event for me not to go to as Microsoft didn’t do much of anything new and Google’s announcements, well, let’s just say Robin Williams and the car seemed like the best part there. Yahoo quietly announced their mobile gig and they bought Webjay the online playlist organizer and sharing service. On the Tivo front, looks like I’ll be skipping the Series2 and be considering the Tivo Series3 this year, and here I believed TiVo would be swallowed by a bigger fish by now. Wrong there. Think I’ll stay out of the prediction business for awhile. Miss Cleo I have nothing on you.

And this week the news in the Mac space is newer, more expensive hardware — who’d a thunk it? — the MacBook. There is more news on the Apple front that I need to get caught up with, particularly their blog client with AJAX: iWeb. My Mac blog is extremely outdated. Will get on that in the next few days hopefully.

Speaking of getting to things later, I definitely am wanting to get more into the MSN AdCenter stuff. It’s on the list, on the list. Really, the signup screen has been in the browser for almost the last 24 hours.

But wait, none of that is what I really wanted to talk about in this entry.

Onto the subject of hiring good people.

Today I had an interview with someone who may be our next producer. By the time you read this the interview will already be over, so there is no outside chance if she is a Hmm blog reader that she’ll get any clues for how to interview with me (this time around, at least).

In the small few jobs I’ve held and businesses I’ve ran, I’ve hired hundreds of people over the years and conducted many more interviews and fortunately have had only to deal with a few terminations (management and employee) directly. I don’t like having to reprimand people, write them up, much less fire anybody, but if you own or manage a business and have people working for you, then it’s a necessary part of the job. I won’t talk specifics of course on any of the past hires or fires, that would be totally inappropriate, but I will share some of the things I’ve learned about hiring good people in general.

Does level of schooling really matter? - I think if someone has a college education it’s important but some people can’t afford to get a college education or get in a relationship and have a child or make mistakes that prevent them from getting a college education. Should these people pay for it for the rest of their lives? Should they be forced to find low end, minimum wage scale jobs? Or should they be given a chance to show what they have if trained properly?

Circumstances might have them going to get work early in their life instead of being able to pursue schooling more actively. I was on my own at a very young age, paying rent while still in high school. I worked two jobs, three jobs at one point and have only really had a half dozen jobs in my entire working life (20+ years), two of those jobs (one currently) which lasted 10+ years.

Frankly, I’m more concerned about the school of hard knocks then only what school a person graduated. All this emphasis on hiring people only — or primarily with — college educations is bogus. Yeah, I know there are studies which tell you that college education candidates make more money but there are also some self-made millionaires, and dare I suggest billionaires who barely got a high school diploma. Putting too many eggs in the education basket can lead to a bad hire.

Relevant job experience - another common thing that too much emphasis being put on prior relevant job experience. I worked in the restaurant business before going into our own current offline business which is almost totally unrelated and I can tell you from experience I had absolutely none of it in either profession. The only experience I’ve ever had is writing experience. I’ve been writing most of my life. Since I could walk around with pen and paper and form coherent thoughts. Pretty young.

I certainly didn’t have any sales experience and my offline busines is all about selling. If they had looked at me and said: this clown has no circus experience, I likely wouldn’t have the time to be writing this now. Maybe I’d be dying hanging over a fryer because the cook didn’t show up. Restaurant management is a very time consuming thing and though the pay can be good if you get into higher level management, it is long hours, weekends and nights with employees that often care more about their hair and who’s dating who than customers. I applaud any and all restaurant managers for their hard work, especially those who have been at the same job for more than five years. Those people should be high on the probable hire list into any job which requires patience, good communication skills and determination and not super specialized skills (like rocket science). Relevant job experience should be a factor, yes, but you also have to look at what this candidate did and for whom and how long.

Flexibility - every job I’ve ever worked for has days where things go sideways. Sometimes that means having to work longer, sometimes going some place you didn’t intend to go. I’ve met customers at Denny’s at 2am to close deals because that was where and when the time was right. If the position being hired for requires a candidate who is flexible be sure to focus on flexibility questions like: what if you had to stay an extra three hours to get the work done on time? What if you had to come in early every day for a week or two to complete a task/project? How would you feel if you had to take an earlier lunch than longer? Dealing with schedule disruption and unexpected changes can be quite revealing. The answers to these questions, particularly if they appear genuine can say a lot about the candidate and what they like and dislike.

And I suppose here is where I should mention professional interviewers. Some people have been in and out of jobs so many times that they know exactly what to say. With people who have lots of jobs in the past and never stayed with them one of the first questions should be why? And then if we hired you here, would we just be another line on the resume?

What did the candidate dislike about their prior job? - everybody has something they disliked about their current and prior jobs. If they answer with I loved everything they are lying, sorry. I can rattle off a list of a dozen things I disliked about the restaurant busines but at the same time I can list a lot more that I enjoyed or was proud of when I worked there.

Knowledge tests and quizzes - I hate tests and quizzes. I had to take some really dumb personality tests which asked questions like: what would you do at a party with a bunch of people you didn’t know? Sit in the corner? Go up and talk to people? Hmm, let’s see … I think I’ll sit in the corner and never say anything to anybody. That should go well.

Not.

How many people answer these questions honestly (I did, because I’m an outgoing person, actually)? It’s one thing if you are hiring a computer programmer and asking them to rough out some code or talk about how they might solve a particular coding challenge, but quite another to show them some code and time them or watch how quickly they solve the problem, relying heavily on the results of the test.

Really you are testing/quizzing how well the candidate takes test, not really how smart they are. Some very smart people just aren’t very good at tests. Maybe, just maybe because they don’t want to be. Tests actually prove very little in the real world. Retention of knowledge, maybe. I’d rather see what steps a person would take to solve a problem than know they memorized answers from a book and scored 100%. Maybe that’s just me.

I’m a lousy test taker. However, give me the information that will be included in the test and some time to research, I will come prepared, and though I might not be able to pick the right answer out of a multiple choice, I will be able to describe the basic answer. Therefore, I usually shy away from hiring people based primarily on tests or quiz results. I have used them for a few positions — sometimes it was required that I did that — but they weren’t a key factor in the hiring decision. More like something just to see how they handled taking a test.

I’ve got more but this post is starting to get away from me. I left out a lot of stuff, bummer. I’ll continue if this stuff interests folks, but I’ll shut up now if it’s not going anywhere productive. I’m even struggling into what category to put it in. Health and lifestyle? Mmmm, ok. That’s about as close as hamburger to pizza.

Bottom line in hiring folks is to find what kind of person would fit the jigsaw puzzle of the team as close as possible. Not having a good idea what that position is like first (do they have to be a team player, will h/she work more independently, meetings, telecommuting, etc), can make it much easier to hire the wrong candidate.

Also having too many preconceived notions about the quality of a resume. I read stuff about resumes and their importance all the time. You know what my resume is?

If you guessed nowhere then you are correct. I have written maybe two or three resumes in my life, besides when it was required for class projects. I don’t have one now and if I was asked to make one, then it would be something out of the ordinary and very unboring.

It’s where I’ve been and what I’ve done, yes, but it’s also what I have the ability to do tomorrow and how much I care about the work I do. A resume can’t answer those questions.

Anybody wanna hire me? If you subscribe to this blog, then in a sense you just did.

Ok, I’ll let this one go, this isn’t an employment blog, but if more of this material is of interest then I’ll continue in the comments and/or another post.

A Robert Frost aside:
… and miles to go before I sleep.

Did this post make you go hmm?

F = please no more posts like this D = not among your best stuff C = average post B = good post, I liked it A = great post, please create more like this (Hmm, no ratings yet)