I have been doing interviews over the last few weeks for two open positions that I have. I really hate hiring people. Don’t misunderstand, I like bringing new people into the company, I just hate the process of deciding who it’s going to be.
I work with recruiters for the most part. They pre-screen applicants and send me over resumes of people that they think will work. I’m pretty sure that both of the recruiters I use really hate working with me. I’m not very good at providing feedback about what I like and don’t like. It’s very hard for me to quantify what appeals to me on a particular resume. If I do find one I like, then I do 30 minute call with the candidate to decide whether they should come in for a full interview. I’m actually even worse about being able to quantify what I liked or didn’t like after the phone call. You see, with me, it’s all mostly done on a gut feeling. I just seem to know whether someone is going to work out or not. I actually have a pretty good track record on people that I hire working out, so my gut must be (more or less) accurate.
I think it was Jack Welch that said, “Your gut feeling is really just pattern recognition.” I suppose that’s true. There are resumes that stand out to me for some reason, or reasons. There are people that I know I’m going to get along with based on the calls and some I know that I won’t. It’s just for the life of me I can’t say exactly what it is. It’s some complex combination of things. I suppose it’s the right balance of trade-offs. No one ever has exactly what I want. Sometimes they have everything that I think they need, but they still just don’t seem right and I don’t exactly understand why.
It’s too bad that we have to make hiring decisions based on resumes and several hours of interviews. A company makes a huge investment of time and resources when it hires an employee. Sure, you can fire people if they don’t work out, but that is actually pretty hard to do these days. Even if you do go through the trouble, it’s still been a huge waste of money and time. I wish there was another way. I don’t have any good ideas of what it would be though.
Some of your process (actually most of it) is a bit hereditary. Sometimes the best resume, interview, and recommendations lead to the wrong person. Sometimes it is exactly opposite in that the poorest resume, a botched interview, and some poor reports actually lead to a wonderful person. You're on the right track.
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