Angel Investment Journal - Angel Investing and Entrepreneur Blog

Marc has a post discussing hiring practices that is pretty insightful. Give it a read if you have time (it is long for a blog post). He discusses three main things to consider when hiring someone:

1) Drive
2) Curiosity
3) Ethics

Drive is obvious.

Curiosity relates to identifying if the position is something that the person would enjoy doing. For example, if you are hiring for a programmer position, does the candidate stay updated on related news and topics? Does he read industry blogs, magazines, forums? Does she have opinions and ideas on trends in the industry?

When testing for ethics, he suggests:

Test for how someone reacts when they don’t know something. Pick a topic you know intimately and ask the candidate increasingly esoteric questions until they don’t know the answer. They’ll either say they don’t know, or they’ll try to bullshit you.

Guess what. If they bullshit you during the hiring process, they’ll bullshit you once they’re onboard.

I like to see what other people do. I don’t think we have a great hiring process, even though we are constantly in hiring mode. We give short intelligence tests at all our companies for all new hires. We are not looking for the brightest people, instead we are just trying to weed out the ones that are clearly lacking in the intelligence department. We only have 17 questions. From experience, the difference in performance between someone that gets 13 right and 17 right is not a big deal in performance. But if someone does not get 11 or more right, it is a telling sign.

When we decided to start giving the test to candidates, we gave it to existing employees.  It was surprisingly accurate in helping predict people with potential and the people that would be better off in another position. Every person that was in the top 30% of our company scored above a certain threshold. Whereas the bottom 30% of the people almost all scored below a certain mark.

It is not an amazing test nor is it extremely accurate at predicting just how well a person will do. But it is one tool that helps us in identifying people we should avoid hiring. That alone is a great help because one bad employee is a drain on any company.