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:

  1. 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?"
  2. 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.
  3. 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?
  4. Hiring for lack of weakness versus existence of strength. Ben Horowitz has a great post on this.
  5. 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.
  6. Not taking the candidate's user experience while interviewing into account--have a game plan of what the ideal experience should be like.
  7. Employees are late to the interview. Have a policy where if people are late too many times, they can't interview anymore.
  8. 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.
  9. The interview panel doesn't debrief on each candidate to improve calibration and quickly make decisions.
  10. 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