How to get better at hiring

It's the most important lever to improving your team, your org, your company, and your pocketbook

Hiring is the most important thing you can do as a manager. Hell, as an IC as well. There is nothing, absolutely nothing as impactful to the success of an organization as the quality of the people in it. Underneath every cool product or novel technology lies the people that made it. If those people are outstanding, it (almost) always follows that the organization is awesome and does awesome stuff.

Yet hiring gets a bad rap.

Some people see it more like a chore than a sacred responsibility. A distraction that prevents them from doing REAL WORK. Or they expect it’s the job of HR to figure out who should join the company.

Let’s fix that misperception, ya?

I’ve been lucky to serve in two organizations that took hiring as a sacrosanct duty: First, in the Army’s Special Forces Regiment, and then second, at Amazon. Both of these organizations knew how important it was to the success of their mission that they let in only the best. So they implemented an extremely rigorous set of processes to make sure hiring was done well. This has definitely shaped my strong opinions on recruiting and hiring.

For the Special Forces Regiment, our “hiring” process was the famous Special Forces Qualification Course (SFQC). A 2-year long course with multiple phases and gates intending to weed out those who didn’t belong. Go watch “Two Weeks in Hell”, which is a documentary on the very first phase of the course, known as the Assessment phase. In fact, you don’t even have to watch it! Just recognize the fact that the Discovery channel decided to call the documentary Two Weeks in Hell and that it’s just covering the phase where they’re seeing if you’re even worth letting in to the course. You should get the idea. Candidates in the SFQC are under constant surveillance, getting assessed on everything big and small, as the cadre look to identify people who could be a risk to the mission and the unit.

Editor’s note - back in my day, it was Three Weeks in Hell, and we liked it that way shakes fist angrily

At Amazon, there was a lot less rolling in the mud with heavy logs on your chest, but there was a similar commitment to having very high standards for who should be hired. Amazon is famous in corporate circles for its “Bar Raiser” program, which is where any hiring decision must include someone from a completely different organization, assigned randomly, who not only participates in the evaluation of a candidate but serves as a judge/arbiter over the rest of the team. If the bar raiser senses the team isn’t holding themselves to Amazon’s high standards, they can veto the candidate and block the hiring decision. This internal policing helps ensure no matter where in Amazon’s sprawling enterprise hiring efforts are happening, they are always to standard.

The second powerful effect at Amazon is the concept of “raising the bar”. The thinking goes that in order to always be improving and growing, Amazon can only ever hire people that are better than 50% of the people in similar roles. If you’re hiring for a Sr. Product Manager, then any candidate that worth extending an offer to must prove themselves to be better than 50% of existing Senior PMs. This is Amazon’s way of ensuring they only let in the best and to fight the entropy that naturally occurs as organizations grow in size. The bigger the organization, the harder it is to manage and get to do things, and Amazon fights that via its hiring practices. It was really something fantastic to behold.

So I’ve seen it done well. I’ve also seen it not done well.

At WeWork, they were growing so fast they let just about any one in, as they were desperate for help. My interview process was a couple quick chats. I remember asking the HR director if she had any questions about my candidacy and she said “nah, I can pretty much make the assessment right away”.

Go watch the Hulu documentary to learn how this worked out for WeWork.

At Flexport, we copied a lot of what Amazon did (because so many of us were ex-Amazon). It worked moderately well, except the challenge with trying to copy Amazon is that YOU AREN’T AMAZON. Amazon has so thoroughly commoditized talent that trying to copy/paste their processes anywhere else is impossible. There’s a reason Amazon gets described as “the place overqualified people go to feel bad about themselves”.

At Anduril, I’ve got the chance to make my own mark on how my org hires and how the whole company hires. This blog post is an edited and editorialized (read: more swearing and memes) version of the hiring SOP I’ve developed for my team.

Expectations

I set expectations with my team that hiring is our #1 priority, for the reasons stated at the top of this post. My calendar reflexes as much, as there have been days I’ve done 5 interviews. If you’re a manager, you must make it explicit to your team where hiring lies in their priority, otherwise you should expect it to be seen as “just another admin task”. That attitude ensures your organization will suffer a slow death.

Similar to Amazon, we are implementing a “raise the bar” process, to ensure we only hire people who are better than the majority of us already here. Hiring someone who’s as-good or less talented than people already on the team makes the team as a whole worse, not better.

Put another way, someone we were okay extending an offer to in 2023 should not get an offer in 2024.

Only people who we were over the moon excited about in 2023 should get an offer in 2024. The bar only raises, it does not stay put! Stasis is death. Hiring managers need to hire people they are scared of managing because of how good they are. To do anything else is like dropping an anchor when you need to be raising your sails.

I can’t emphasize this enough. There’s plenty of evidence that the larger an organization gets, the worse its performance is, in large part because having “okay to sorta-good” team members drastically increases the amount of toil necessary to get things done. Consider how many meetings and documents must get generated to gather alignment. Much of that work is a direct output of having people who just aren’t quite strong enough to keep pace with the parts of the organization that is moving fast. So the organization has no choice to slow itself down.

It’s the law of the jungle and in the jungle, the slow ones are the ones that get eaten.

How to Hire Great People

I’m going to skip a lot of the parts that go around sourcing and recruiting candidates. That’s important parts of the process, but not what I’m writing about today. Today, I’m focusing on what is the most critical step of the process, the interview. When it’s just you and the candidate in a room (or on a call) and you’ve got 30/45/60 minutes to asses the totality of this person’s potential worth to your team.

It’s not only the most important part, it’s the hardest. Because not only does the candidate have to bring their “A game”, so do you! But sadly, little time gets spent on trying to up-skill people’s ability to interview others. Typically, they just get told to hop in the room and chat with the candidate about their experiences.

This is classic “failing to plan is planning to fail”. I’m confident the vast majority of interviews are a waste of time because the interviewer doesn’t know how to interview well and they have no concept of “what right looks like”.

Typical interviews come down to assessing 2 core things:

1) Do I like this person?

2) Do they seem to know how to do the work I want them to do?

The Foxhole test

On #1 (do we like them), there is a correlation between likeability and their overall additive nature to the organization, but it’s a weak one. Easy enough to screen out someone who is a jerk, it’s harder to screen out someone who’s nice and friendly but isn’t going to raise the quality bar. Nice underperformers can be exceptionally damaging to the org because we delay taking corrective actions since they’re enjoyable to be around.

Instead, we need to ask ourselves “is this who I want at my side at 2am on a Sunday when everything is on fire?” In that sort of situation, you don’t care about how nice and friendly that person is, you care about how good their work is and their level of commitment to the mission. Obviously the quality of work varies based off their experience (we wouldn’t expect an entry level person to do senior level performance, of course you’re checking their work), but the principle stands. I call this the “foxhole check”, as in “would you want to share a foxhole in battle with this person?” Because while you’d definitely prefer the other person in the foxhole to be someone you could have fun with, what really matters is they’ve got your back when the shooting starts and you know they’ll do their job to the utmost.

Are they better than 50% of us already here?

On #2 (do they seem to know how to do the work we want them to do), it’s a more straight-forward matter of raising internal expectations for what constitutes good. Suppose you score candidates on a scale of 1 to 4 (from strong no (1) to no (2) to yes (3) to strong yes (4)). Plainly put, if someone was a 3 in 2023, they should be a 2 in 2024. Whether it’s a technical assessment or a behavioral one, we all still grade the candidate from 1 to 4, so now we just tighten our tolerance for what constitutes a 3 or 4. Any new hire should, by definition of “raising the bar”, be better than 50% of the team. So compare the candidate’s competency to the rest of the team and if it’s not clear that they’re better than at least half, they shouldn’t be a 3.

This can be a scary thing to assess, because what if they’re better than you? Or your coworkers, who you are friends with? But across my entire career, every time I’ve hired someone who was better than me, I got better as a result. By hiring people you’re scared of managing because they’re so good, you put yourself in a situation where you are motivated to improve yourself. As they saying goes “A players hire other A players, B players hire C players”. Don’t be a B Player, step into the discomfort that comes from being surrounded by exceptional performers and let it fuel your own growth!

Asking Better Questions

Getting satisfactory answers out of a candidate so you can assess them against the “foxhole check” and their competencies requires an interviewer to maintain a high level of curiosity during the interview. The classic “5 Whys” approach serves very well in this situation - keep asking “why” after they respond to a question until you’ve asked it 5 times, at which point you’ve almost certainly arrived at the root cause of the situation and fully exposed the depth of the candidates’ understanding. This requires you to have some healthy skepticism and be careful to not lead the candidate to the answers you’re hoping they give. Think of each question you ask of the candidate as a puzzle you’ve got to solve, slowly unraveling it, moving around to approach the problem from different angles to see if you can gain a better comprehension. So whether it’s a code review, architectural design whiteboarding session, or classic behavioral prompt (“tell me about a time you...”), it’s the same method of investigation.

The “Potential” Trap

Do not assess them based on their potential, assess on their face value of what they demonstrated in the interview. Potential is their face value + what you would do if you were them. That’s a slippery slope and you can trick yourself into seeing things that aren’t really there. You don’t want to bet your team’s future performance on what you hope someone grows into.