I hired twice the people in half the time by changing my decision-making style | Hacker News Reader

I hired twice the people in half the time by changing my decision-making style

medium.com

13 pointshalfshark11 comments

Link shorteners are highly discouraged on HN. This link goes to http://bit.ly/19IUGXU?cc=79a16693e4e904c00490c6eb9a2d621e (and you can see the stats https://bitly.com/19IUGXU+ ) which finally redirects to the actual article https://medium.com/p/d3b5d9216145

The term for this style of short circuit decision making is "satisficing.". There's a wide body of economic psychology that suggests that satisficing selection algorithms (as opposed to optimizing selection algorithms) lead to greater happiness.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satisficing

I remember learning about that in micro econ. Maybe I did learn something in business school after all.

I typically recommend this in my line of work, especially for occupations that are non-abundant in the relevant labor markets. Hiring can be expensive if only for the time spent looking for that perfect candidate which ultimately appears only marginally more qualified, and vacant positions carry a cost themselves.

Add on to that the fact that most employers use selection techniques with relatively low validities (e.g., interviews, particularly unstructured) and that validity degrades over time anyway (i.e., performance between someone predicted as "good" vs. "mediocre" is much more noticeable early in the employment relationship than it is six months or a year later).

You can do a lot better than this, with only an incremental cost. Look for an adequate fit; pass on them. Then accept the next fit that is better than that first fit.

Its a whole standard deviation better result, at probably less than double the cost. Works for lots of things: choosing shoes, a wife or husband, entrée on a menu etc.

Are you talking about this problem? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem The math is a little different: You can increase your chances of finding the single best applicant in a pool just by discarding the first 36.8% that you come across, then picking the next one that is better than those.

I know Vungle is a pretty young company, but how long have the people you hired this way generally stayed with the company? Really interested in how short hiring cycles translate to culture fit and employee longevity.

So is the author of the article; I hope she writes a follow-up whenever it becomes clear how her strategy has worked out!

Thanks, guys! We're still early in the process, but I'm more than happy to do an update next year! Let me know if I can give you any more information.

This sounds like a really bad idea.You'll end up with a bunch of mediocre people and a few that carry all the weight. Soft skills are great in marketing, but in development, give me competent developers over ppt writers any day.

That's not the impression I got from reading the article. It says:

"Instead of interviewing everyone on the planet and trying to optimize, I set a goal to hire the first person who met all of my criteria."

If one of her criteria is "must be a competent developer", then she's going to get competent developers.

The kind of criteria she can easily compromise on are:

- Some kind of mythical perfect "cultural fit" (e.g., must like to have beer with co-workers after work and eat lunch with them every day).

- An exact match on salary requirements (instead of finding someone who will work for $100K or below, pay them their asking salary of $110K; time is money, and if you hire someone today, you'll get to market faster).

- Must know every single open source library you're using (if they know 5 out of 8, they can learn the other three faster than it would take you to find the "perfect candidate").

- Attended a fancy college and got a 4.0 GPA (if someone has a few years of work experience, that stuff doesn't matter much anymore).

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