What are some mistakes that startups make in hiring employees? originally appeared on Quora - the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
Answer by Suhail Doshi, CEO and co-founder of Mixpanel, on Quora:
- Asking interview questions that correlate very low with actual performance in the job. Example: "How many golf balls can you fit in a school bus.", "Have your parents ever started a business?"
- Not getting the team on the same page with what they're looking for in a person. Everyone has their own idea of what a great person for the position would be. Have the debate early, not after you've interviewed people.
- Allowing the interview panel to bias each other by talking about how good or bad the candidate was. People rarely want to disagree with a top performing peer or their boss. Also, why not give the candidate a fair shot with everyone?
- Hiring for lack of weakness versus existence of strength. Ben Horowitz has a great post on this.
- The only data used to determine whether to hire is a thumbs up or thumbs down policy. People perform on a spectrum and we should determine whether important strengths that you need can be uplifted later.
- Not taking the candidate's user experience while interviewing into account--have a game plan of what the ideal experience should be like.
- Employees are late to the interview. Have a policy where if people are late too many times, they can't interview anymore.
- Too many people interview the candidate. There's research from Google where more than 4-5 people has diminishing returns on your accuracy of determining whether a candidate is good or not.
- The interview panel doesn't debrief on each candidate to improve calibration and quickly make decisions.
- Startups can over-rotate on hiring people with experience versus hunger when the earliest employees start to hit scaling issues with their teams. Everyone had to be given a chance at some point.
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Published on: Jul 18, 2016