Brian Balfour: evaluation

Transcript context

…You touched on this is useful for hiring, but also performance, like how they're doing at the job, right? There's always just like, "Here's what I've done", but you look at what they've done and it's like ... I don't know. Yeah. Well, because even ... Especially as a company grows, there's all sorts of processes to put somebody up for a promotion and all that kind of stuff, and the way a lot of those processes are designed is the individual that's going up for promotion tries to tell a story about what they have accomplished and then the manager's going to advocate for them. And I think in that process, there's just too many opportunities to either twist what actually happened or there's all sorts of biases that end up involving. And so me as a potential decision maker on a yes or no on that decision, all I have to go off of, being multiple steps away from this person's work, is essentially these words that are being promoted. And how can I actually make an accurate yes or no decision on that? I can't. And it works in the reverse direction too. People who are doing amazing work, but maybe not the best at advocating for themselves, or maybe have managers that aren't doing the best job at advocating for themselves, end up feeling disenfranchised and forgotten and just a lot of bad feelings emerge. And that's how you lose essentially these really talented people. So even in processes like that, it's like, how do you surface the person's work over the past time period so that the ultimate decision maker can look at that work, go straight to the source rather than relying on this game of telephone that's happening as well? And so something that we've started to try to implement at Reforge, what we're doing it very slowly, is building in regular processes for people to record the work that they've accomplished internally, kind of keep a log of it, the things that they've helped create and ship, so that when it comes to those conversations, it's already easily packaged and can be surfaced as part of that process. So I think it works in a bunch of different avenues, but it just kind of comes back. There's so much more you can glean from inspecting the actual creations of somebody than just a surface level conversation. Amazing. Just one more question before we get to our next lesson; along that same line you just mentioned of just how to actually do this. So you mentioned exercises in the interview. I think the extreme of that is something Linear does, which I recently learned about, where they have a work trial where they work with the team for five days, one to five days. You just mentioned keeping track of your wins. Is there anything else you can share of just how you actually implement this sort of lesson?…

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