January 15, 2008 at 12:37 pm
As long as 'getting over the bar' includes:
- technical expertise
- understanding of the field / industry / software / environment
- appropriate level of experience
- match of experience to job level / pay / job duties
- communications ability
- behaviorial characteristics (gets along with people, etc.)
- attitude
I got the impression from the discussion so far that most of the emphasis was on technical capability - if they passed the technical questions then they were chosen. I believe there are many more characteristics that are important that should be evaluated and scored consciously (many times these are 'unconscious' 'feelings').
By including those characteristics explicitly you start to learn and recognize in more detail the person you are looking for and who will make a good fit. Without that conscious review you may miss clues / characteristics that are important that were the reason why someone else didn't work out (but you don't know why because you never consciously acknowleged that criteria).
January 15, 2008 at 2:31 pm
I certainly don't mind interviewing, but I'd like to think someone would hire me 🙂
Course, hoping I don't ever have to find out 😉
January 15, 2008 at 3:47 pm
I think the key element here is setting the bar at the right level. It's not unlike the high-jumping event pictured with the editorial. If you set your initial jump height too low, you are going to waste time AND energy making those initial jumps, at the risk of not leaving yourself enough energy to make the jumps you could have made otherwise. But if you set it too high to start, you may not even qualify at all for the event. Although I never did that, I saw it happen and it's a real bummer if it happens to you. The difference with hiring someone, of course, is that you can lower the bar after you set it too high, but still it wastes valuable time along with the opportunity cost of not having someone in the position you need filled.
When setting the bar for a job candidate, as long as you set it at a level that will ensure (as much as you can at least) success, then you can't really go wrong hiring the first person who qualifies. And as others have mentioned, there is the risk that if you pass on such a candidate, you may not find a better one, or even if you do it may take more time than you thought.
Having said that, then there are the other variables that come into play such as how many qualified applicants have responded, how many of them can we interview by when, their locations and salary requirements, the hiring budget, the urgency of the need to fill the position, what else the hiring manager needs to be spending their time on, is the position a direct revenue-generating position, as well as the often quirky and bureaucratic requirements of a company's HR procedures, which in my experience tend to grow in quirkiness along with the size of the hiring company.
Then again, you could always flip a coin. 🙂
January 15, 2008 at 7:08 pm
It is actually a lot like dating.
In Geoffrey Miller's "The Mating Mind", a rule called "Try a Dozen" is suggested. It entails interviewing 12 possible candidates and remembering the best, and then picking the next one you see who is even better.
According to the book, this simple rule will pick a candidate who is so close to the best possible you could get by using the most complicated mathematical decision models, that searching more is a waste of time.
The basic assumption this rule operates under, is that a candidate will have to be picked right at the interview - there's no going back to previous candidates, so it is a good strategy for picking from a slow trickle of candidates over a long time. If all candidates are interviewed at the same time, so that it would not be too late to go back to a previous one, just picking the best of the 12 might be smartest.
January 18, 2008 at 8:55 am
This sounds like an example of the "Secretary Problem":
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