Shishir Mehrotra: preference

Transcript context

…You may have mentioned this, but what's the question there? Is there a question that you could recommend? The absolute ideal case is you get to the person that you're doing the reference check with and you don't even tell them who you're asking about and you just say, "When you think of your teams, who is best at..." And this obviously only works in cases where you have a pretty deep relationship with the person you're getting referenced from and so on. So you can't always do that. But ideally you want to mimic that behavior. One of the things I think that's hard about reference checks is people have... They have perverse incentives in a reference check. They're not really... Some of it is for good reason. Some of it is for bad reason. People generally don't like criticizing people and they also feel judged themselves and they don't want... There's legal reasons that things can blow back and so on. And so what I try really hard to do is to draw contrasts. So you try to say things... There's a couple of techniques I've used for this. In the best case you say, "I'm not going to even tell you who I'm asking about, but when you think about this team who regularly identifies what problems they should focus on? Who is most reliable at coming up with the solutions to the hardest problems?" And you work your way through it. The other way I like to do it is to provide contrast to give the person an out to not make it obvious to them that I have this ranking. And so I'll say things like, "When you think about this person, and I'll give you four different personas. Someone who's regularly coming up with the problems that the team should be focused on. Someone who given a set of problems is constantly solving them in this really creative way. The person that is just really good at getting a team moving. Or the person who can take a playbook and execute it with high precision and high quality and stuff." And I won't tell them that I have a qualitative judgment that one is better than the other, but you want them... Because you just want your reference check to talk and you want them to say what's on their mind of... You want to give them an opening to not feel like they're judging. Obviously, another question I always ask people is, "Would you hire this person again? Or how excitedly would you hire this person again?" I always ask them, "What questions should I have asked that I didn't?" Another key technique for reference checks is you just need people to... Once they start talking, they'll reveal what they really feel and often the little things will come out. But for this particular thing, if I want to know where they stand on this axis, don't tell people what you value. By the way, I will say I value P over S over H over E. I've seen many companies that would reverse that scale. And by the way, there's industries where it's very required. You don't want a bunch of people running around and constantly telling you to solve some different problem. I just need people that can do this job that we give them super, super well. very required. You don't want a bunch of people running around and constantly telling you to solve some different problem. I just need people that can do this job that we give them super, super well. And it depends a bit what your personality is and what your company's culture is and so on. So it's not actually that unbelievable that I might value the E over the P. Anybody who knows me, that's probably not true, but for a reference check, you can probably not give that away.…

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