Adam Ward: evaluation

Transcript context

…This episode is brought to you by Mercury. Radically different banking, loved by over 300,000 entrepreneurs, and now with Command. I've been a customer of Mercury's for over six years. I have never once though about leaving. Mercury is basically what happens when banking is built by product people, not by bankers. They make it so easy, dare I say fun, to send invoices, move money around, set up virtual cards for folks on my team. Does your bank have an API, a terminal native CLI, or an AI-ready MCP server? I don't think so. And just recently they launched Command, a conversational interface built directly into Mercury, which acts as your financial operator. I've been using Command to transfer money around to figure out what categories I've been spending the most money in, analyzing my cash flows. And just today I used it to find out how much I've made from a specific sponsor over the past year. I just asked, "How much have I made from X over the past year?" 10 seconds later, I have an answer. It is so freaking cool. Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a FinTech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column NA Members FDIC. Okay, so if people have been following along, we're working our way through the funnel. This is my strategy here. So we've talked about how to figure out what you're looking for, figure out who these people are, how to get them talking to you. Say you got them in the interview stage. What are some things you've learned about how to increase your signal on the person and identify if they're a good fit and someone you want to make an offer to? Yeah, some of it's a little fundamental, which is research has shown that work samples are the highest predictor of success at a company, but yet most companies are still spending a lot of time doing one-to-one across the table assessments. And so I think we are famously known for doing long onsite experiences for some of our roles where they do a project and they get work to side by side. So that gives us a very strong signal. It also gives them the candidate tremendous signal. And so I think this is where most companies get it wrong on the onsite. They're almost always buying. ... On the onsite, they're almost always buying. This is like we are assessing, we're extracting information. We're not giving much back to the candidate. And I'm a big fan of the power of self-selection. And really good self-selection serves really good inputs and data. And so we want that experience with a candidate to feel more two-way than most. So we really think about crafting that onsite experience through who they might meet. We talked about that. We really clear handpicking who they might meet for those interviews. We do a lot of work sample and project type of work to give us good signal, but we also really curate who's greeting them, who's sitting beside them for lunch. We always try to put it around a meal, a dinner or lunch or a breakfast. And everything is really curated to make that as high quality experience for them and get them the data, but also us getting data from people that we feel like are most going to connect with that person. Who runs point on this sort of experience? Is it a recruiter or is it the hiring manager?…

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