Great teams hire “high-clarity and high-energy” people | Hacker News Reader

Great teams hire “high-clarity and high-energy” people

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Hi hn!

Early hires are so crucial in a startup. I've made dozens of interview loops to try and tease out the people who will raise the bar but honestly it just made for longer interviews with about the same mis-hire rate. When I was hiring for my last two startups, I added a simple check to our interview loops: "Were they clear and did they provide good energy". Our mis-hire rate dropped. I wrote this to talk more about how I got there and start a discussion!

I agree both of these are useful skill but overly focusing on these concerns me. In your experience, is there a possibility that this lead to bias? Folks who are first generation immigrants, may not have gone to the top schools, may be very productive but not as fluent with English as native speakers. How do you account for this?

In my experience, people who are highly creative are not always crisp at communication. How do you reconcile this? I work as a research scientist and this is from sample across multiple top-tier research labs.

In my experience, I agree with the fact that top school people don't correlate with the best hires but my data shows that high clarity + high energy does not correlate with top schools! In fact, I have many high-clarity // low-energy folks as examples.

I think that not being crisp at communication does not mean you wont be clear. English was not my first language so I empathize! More recently, I've worked with south american developers who are not 100% fluent but are very clear in what they mean (ie. consistent and form solid ideas/thoughts/visions). And early in my career at Alexa, many researchers (lots of top-rate folks) were international and didn't have 100% fluency in english but were 100% clear about what they were building, their methods, and how we were going to test their hypotheses.

Unfortunately, the default meaning of clear is: speaks english well. But I am speaking about clarity in thinking and being able to represent that consistently in words.

Also, I realized, an over-arching concern could be: Does this promote bias?

Yes.

Especially in early-stage, it's about how fast can you go and are you iterating enough. For example: Some of the advice for hiring early stage is "hire your friends/people-you-know". Instant bias.

Over time it's about taking that risk on less-clear-thinkers to help refine their thinking or more junior folks to grow them but at the start: there is very little risk in execution that you can handle.

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