How to hire great people: drive, curiosity and ethics
I’ve just come across this article from Marc Andreessen about hiring.
It raises some interesting points about the hiring process, which he bases in three criteria.
Drive
I like to see what someone has done. Not been involved in, or been part of, or watched happen, or was hanging around when it happened.
If you’re a programmer: the open source project to which you’ve made major contributions.
Something.
If you can’t find anything — if a candidate has just followed the rules their whole lives, showed up for the right classes and the right tests and the right career opportunities without achieving something distinct and notable, relative to their starting point — then they probably aren’t driven.
And you’re not going to change them.
Motivating people who are fundamentally unmotivated is not easy.
Curiosity
Sit a programmer candidate for an Internet company down and ask them about the ten most interesting things happening in Internet software.
REST vs SOAP, the new Facebook API, whether Ruby on Rails is scalable, what do you think of Sun’s new Java-based scripting language, Google’s widgets API, Amazon S3, etc.
If the candidate loves their field, they’ll have informed opinions on many of these topics.
That’s what you want.
Ethics
Pick a topic you know intimately and ask the candidate increasingly esoteric questions until they don’t know the answer.
They’ll either say they don’t know, or they’ll try to bullshit you.
Guess what. If they bullshit you during the hiring process, they’ll bullshit you once they’re onboard.
He also links to Software Interview, a site which lists questions and answers that several companies use in their hiring processes.