Kevin Yien: preference

Transcript context

…Is there anything else hiring-wise? I know there's probably infinite things that you've done, but is there anything else you think might be worth sharing of things you've learned to be more successful at hiring awesome people? One final note I'll make on unsell email is it's not as if you just send the email and then they either say yes or no. Most of the time they will say, "Thank you. I am cool with six of these. This one freaks me out. Can we talk more?" Definitely. And I think this is where hiring managers have an incredible responsibility that sometimes isn't taken as seriously as it should, which is, when you are working with someone to get them to join or to offer, you need to bend to do whatever it takes for them. And so if they're like, "Hey, the only time I can talk is tonight at 11 o'clock after my kids go to bed." "No problem. Here's my phone number, let's hop on. I will walk you through whatever you want to talk about." That sort of has to be the place you get to for really strong hires. So that's just one other thing I'll say. The meta point around that is you need to be really invested in the candidates. This probably does change at a certain scale, like if you're "organization" is hiring a hundred engineers or whatever, you have process around it, you have pipelines, there's a machine at that point, but I do think the direct hiring managers have a responsibility to be really involved in every individual, because there's no one who's directly hiring a hundred people. It's always within a number that I think you can take on. Okay, so this is the final tactic that I heard you're amazing at, which is automating user research. On the surface this sounds amazing. "I'm going to automate my user research. It's going to be amazing. So great." Talk about why you find this really powerful and important. And then how do you actually do this? How do you automate user research? How have you done this on your teams?…

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