Lenny Rachitsky: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think you can, I think the blind references are key, I think doing real interactive, working on a project together is key. I'll tell you one of the things we learned at HubSpot about this. We would have a candidate come in, let's say a head of engineering, and we'd have eight people interview them. And our scale's one to four. And let's say four people were four out of four, and four people were two out of four. So, that's candidate A. And then the next candidate comes in, eight people interview them, and everyone's a three out of four. Almost every time we hired the three out of four, the person with the least amount of weaknesses. And we changed it, and we went with the spikier people, we went with people with weaknesses, we with people who would challenge stuff, and that has worked out quite well. Our hit rate at HubSpot's improved. We also have shrunk the pool of people on that interview panel from eight to four. We just hired a head of product, and there were just four of us that interviewed them. I think that worked too. So, I think there's things you can do to get better at it, for sure. Okay. This is incredibly tactical and useful. On the references piece, the toughest part is getting people to be honest because there's very little upside to them to say negative things about people. Is there anything that you've learned to help get real honest answers from folks you call for references? Well, I can just say I don't do this a lot anymore, but when people call me, I can tell if they've already decided, and when they're really just looking for... When they ask me for the strengths and weaknesses I'm like, oh, they've already decided. When they ask me something hard, like on a scale of one to 10, how likely you're to hire them again? Stuff like that, that kind of gets at the core. Or were they the top 1% of your employees? That's a good question. Oh, were they top 10? Oh. That type of question is pretty good. So, when I'm on the other side of it, I like when those types of questions come up. I tell you the other mistake everyone makes, and all the CEOs we're making now, is you're hiring for that whatever, head of engineering, and you're blown away by the resume. Like you're 50 employees and you're hiring this person, who's been at Microsoft the last 10 years, and has a fancy title, and is a fancy division in Microsoft, and you hire them, there's just a massive impedance mismatch when you hire them on what their expectations are, and what your expectations are, in the extent that you get your shit together. It's just you don't. You definitely don't, if you're 50 or 500 employees. And they expect you to have your act together. So, that is another... Avoid the big company hire. We hired so many people from Salesforce, and Google, and Microsoft, like 100% attrition rate on all those folks.…

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