Thoughtful Hiring: Selecting for Success

I decided to write this article because I've been using variations of this technique for several years, and while not particularly novel, it might be useful for others to have it written down.

The hiring process for technical talent tends to focus on the skills and experience that apply to the current snapshot of the hiring company's technical landscape. It is possible to select someone based on their technical capability and yet see them be unsuccessful in the job. Identifying the real attributes for success is harder than screening for proficiency in a handful of technologies or experience building particular types of systems. The portion of the interview that focuses on "culture fit" is often superficial and underdeveloped. Knowing what you're looking for can be harder than it sounds. I use a very simple framework to help the hiring team be explicit about the attributes that matter most to success in the role, and how to determine whether a candidate possesses those attributes based on their behavior.

Qualities → Behaviors → Questions

Qualities

The first and most difficult part of the process is to identify the qualities you associate with someone who will be successful in the role. "Expertise in serverless technology" is probably not such a quality, and is not really a quality at all. "Passion for exploring new technologies" might be more like it. Other qualities could include communicative, collaborative, proactive, positive, helpful, and so on. Some qualities are difficult to boil down to a single word, like "the ability to come up with a simple solution to a seemingly complex problem". It's more important to capture the essence of what's important than to wordsmith a clever one-word description of it. The trick is to really hone in on the qualities you feel are critical to success in the role. A good way to start is to identify someone who is already very successful in a similar role and list that person's most important attributes. This is an exercise that lends itself to collaboration with the team who will work most closely with the new hire. Once you have a workable list of qualities, you can order them by significance. This will help as you evaluate candidates, since each that you talk to might be stronger in one area than the other, and knowing which areas are most critical will help you evaluate the tradeoffs.

Behaviors

Once you have a set of qualities, the next step is to list behaviors you would expect to see from a person who possesses those qualities. For each quality in your list, write down associated behaviors. For example, if the quality is "passion for exploring new technologies", you might expect to see that person do research and have side projects involving some new technologies. You might expect them to participate in open source projects around a number of interesting technologies. You might expect them to participate in or even lead local tech meetups and workshops. Again, enumerating a few behaviors for each quality is a good participatory exercise for the hiring team.

Questions

Now that you have a list of behaviors organized by the qualities to which they pertain, you can consider open-ended questions that would help determine whether the candidate exhibits those behaviors, based on actual actions taken rather than philosophical alignment. This part of the process is essentially behavioral interviewing, but it is organized by the behaviors that are associated with the qualities you determined are most important to success in the job.

If the quality you seek is "passion for exploring new technologies" and a behavior you associate with that quality is "research and activity in side projects involving new technologies", you might ask "tell me about the projects you work on for fun", which could lead to a discussion about various passion projects and extra-curricular tech activities. If that question leads to a dead end, you may have one or two other questions that get at the passion of the candidate, like "what's your favorite new technology, and what can you tell me about it?"

One nice aspect of organizing this material collaboratively with the hiring team is that divvying up the questions becomes relatively straightforward. Some of the behaviors you might look for and the questions you might ask could apply to multiple qualities, so there's going to be natural overlap. But if you discuss all the questions in the context of the overarching concerns, the team can be very efficient at exploring the most critical factors for success, and also be consistent in how they evaluate each candidate.

Other Considerations

The biggest question I get from hiring teams using this approach is how it relates to actual technical qualification. Sure, it's important to determine whether the candidate has certain qualities, but they also need to be proficient software developers. In many cases, the technical proficiency of a candidate can be described in terms of qualities and behaviors, but it is also important to evaluate whether they will be able to write code consistent with your expectations. The best way to assess this is to have the candidate write code that is representative of what they will actually do, preferably alongside others. This sort of assessment (e.g. a pair-programming exercise) is complimentary to the behavioral interview described above. In fact, getting a candidate to demonstrate strong programming behaviors on the spot is perhaps the best way to show that they possess the qualities you are looking for in a developer.

There are many great resources for behavioral interviewing techniques that certainly apply to this process, but there is a lot of criticism for this technique as well. If your questions seem formulaic and likely to trigger canned happy-path answers, consider asking them in the context of a real-world scenario from the job. Ask the candidate for advice on how to deal with the situation, prompting them to share similar experiences they might have had. The point of the dialog is to help you determine whether the candidate exhibits behaviors consistent with the qualities you've identified, and the best way to do that is to observe behaviors in the moment versus getting the candidate to tell you a story about how they behaved in the past.

The whole point of this exercise is to really understand what you're looking for and what matters most for success in the specific role you are trying to fill in the context of the specific environment in which you work. It's about being honest with yourself and then getting the hiring team to share that honest viewpoint, and then systematically and evenly engaging with candidates to see how they fit that profile. It also acknowledges that no one candidate will have all the qualities you seek, and it helps you prioritize those you think are most important for success. It's an approach that lends itself to variation depending on your existing hiring practices, and it's easy enough to try without rewriting your hiring handbook. I'm eager to hear about the variations you've used and the success you've had with them.