* Don't hire until you've had to endure the pain of doing the job well yourself. If you don't know how to do the job right, you don't know how to hire for it.
* Don't hire just to capture talent. You'll only end up alienating the talent.
* Stay as small as you can.
* The resume form makes everyone look good, which means it doesn't tell you anything useful.
* Cover letters on the other hand tell you lots, and, incidentally, also tell you how well people can write.
* Sometimes the best candidates distinguish themselves with effort. Their most recent designer hire made this mini-site while applying: http://jasonzimdars.com/svn/
* Questions are good, but beware people who ask too many "how do I...?" questions as opposed to "why...?" questions.
* Test drive if you can. They hired designers for 1-week projects at $1500 before extending FT offers.
* Be flexible about where you hire (they're all over the place), if you can.
Of these points, #2 squares particularly well with my experience (there is a constant gold rush for top talent in software security), but the "how" vs. "why" thing rings false; all sharp questions are good, even if they're draining.
Glad to hear someone well-respected sticking up for cover letters, since there appears to be some controversy about whether they're valuable.
I disagree with point 2. You only alienate the talent if you don't have a culture of exploration. On several occassions I've hired exceptionally bright people, with no clear idea what they might do. In every case they figure out what to do, usually by finding a gap that we didn't even know we had.
Some very smart people are just looking for a place where they can experiment and grow technically and do the basic things they love. If you can utilize these people without having them end up building and testing CRUD apps to justify the headcount, that's fine.
But other very smart people want not only to be doing interesting things, but also to be as close to the money as possible. What they work on needs to have an impact, and have some chance of setting the direction of the company.
If you accidentally hire that latter person into a role designed for the former person, they'll get bored, or, worse, irritated when they try to get close to the money and then rebuffed (or, worse, pigeonholed into something boring).
What I'm saying is, be careful with the notion that you can always find something for an A-player to do. Often, no.
There is a degree of truth in this point. I will also add, though, that some of our best hires aren't doing anything remotely like what we hired them to do...
Definitely a principle of the lean startup, which leaves out the possibility of what potential bright minds can do to expand a company's horizon. This point mainly points out on core competency: do what you do best and let the others do what they're really good at.
But it doesn't leave room for opening to other perspectives and untapped creative ideas from different sources.
Surely a resume aids as a reasonable first pass. Throw out all the people who clearly know nothing about computers. Sure, there's other, possibly better ways to do that, but it seems like a reasonable way to clear out most of the unsuitable applicants quickly.
It probably depends on what you mean by 'resume'. A bit of paper that tells prospective employees about what hot shit you've done, with plenty links to the work seems useful. Just like a dating profile seems useful as a first pass.
A formal resume which says what qualifications you got and what skills you think you have, I agree, isn't very useful at all.
I probably didn't include this (and I should have) because it's my least favorite of his hiring ideas. Being able to write intelligibly is critical and mandatory. Being able to write well is great. But there are other things that are equally great.
I can't even fathom doing that much work up front, just to get hired by someone else. I must be missing something. Maybe they liked the redesign so much, they gave him a signing bonus to bring it to the table.
Given the number of opportunities (people interested in me interviewing, not job offers) that I come across which also seem compelling, the idea of making an in depth cover letter or completing a small project for each one seems a little absurd. Oh, and quit my job to work for you for a week in the hopes of getting a full time offer? Yeah, no thanks.
Yeah, you guys are both making the mistake of thinking that we're talking about yet-another-tech-job.
For yet-another-dev-job or yet-another-QA-job or yet-another-design-job at a cool-sounding company that nobody thinks is going to change their lives, you're right. It's a sellers market for talent. The prospective employer should be the one going to extreme lengths to hire people.
Some people aren't looking for yet-another-job. They have a laser focus on one or two companies that they want to work for --- and not only that, but they know exactly what role they want in those companies. They (gasp) aren't even necessarily looking at the job reqs. They're walking up to 37s and saying "I could really kick ass helping you with your interfaces, here's why, let's get talking."
So, two things:
(1) Fried is saying, you want to run your company in such a way that you're getting exposed to those kinds of people. Which means, you're running a very tight ship with a small number of people so that any ANY hire is going to end up having a dramatic role in the company. You can't be Google and expect people to build mini-sites to get an interchangeable-product dev role.
(2) As a potential employee, you want to consider whether you want to spend your career bouncing from job-req job to job-req job. This isn't touchy-feely startup-y 37signals-y talk here; the entire book "What Color Is Your Parachute" has "get jobs this way" as its theme. Pick a company you think will be awesome, and then sell yourself to that company. You'll be happier than trying to fit yourself into one of the "available" jobs in the industry.
I'm not making that mistake, although you probably couldn't tell from what I wrote. I just think that if you are that talented, why do you want to waste your self-promotion efforts securing yourself a job working for someone else, when you could work for yourself or start a company with someone?
Because starting your own company is incredibly difficult and risky, and because established companies offer a lot of opportunities that you are very unlikely to obtain on your own. That said: I started a company.
If it's true that this advice is only relevant for "supercool" companies like 37Signals, then that should be included either as advice ("become supercool like us") or as a disclaimer.
But I don't think being a supercool company is any reason to treat your candidates disrespectfully either. It's one way to make sure you only get childless employees though. Only a truly irresponsible parent would ever quit his job to work for a company for a trial period, no matter how much they mght like it.
You're totally missing the point(s), so I must be communicating it badly. I'm sorry.
There are two points here.
First: if you are an employer:
Don't hire often. Hire only when you absolutely need to. That way, the people you hire are assured to be critical to your business. Roles where people can be business-critical are inherently more attractive to strong candidates. Strong candidates + business-critical roles = organic hiring, where you simply don't have to put out a req and take the best of the results.
You also need to be a successful business (not "supercool") and you also need to be a good place to work (again, not "supercool"). But lots of successful businesses with good work environments run a recruiting system that forces them to select the best candidate out of a pile of resumes after posting a req, and that sucks.
More importantly:
If you are a prospective employee:
Consider a career-style where you don't ever look at job reqs. Don't look to see who's hiring. You don't care. Instead, you think about what you do best, and where you could be most effective doing it. Are you an animator? Pixar!
Then, beat down their doors and get a job there.
You are going through more effort than normal job seekers do. But at the same time, you are getting more degrees of freedom with your own career, and an assurance that you are really going to fit wherever you land.
Lots of companies won't be able to hire you if you approach them this way. Good. Those companies are assuredly not staffed with people who beat down the doors to get in. You don't want to work there.
> * Don't hire until you've had to endure the pain of doing the job well yourself. If you don't know how to do the job right, you don't know how to hire for it.
Sounds completely unworkable. A quaint aphorism but nothing more - never hire a company lawyer unless you've been to law school and worked as the company lawyer yourself?? If you can't plant the flowerbeds outside your office well yourself then you can't hire a gardener??
That sounds like the writer has not clue what they're talking about; I must have misunderstood!?
Read the actual article, not just the bullet point. It was given as a "rule of thumb," not a solid Law Of Hiring. Fried's point is that if you have no knowledge of a given field, you don't even know if you actually want that kind of employee, much less whether a candidate suits your goals or not.
The example he gives is hiring a "business development" specialist who would evaluate the side deals and the like — stuff that is supposed to help your business grow but isn't part of its core. They were totally flummoxed when they tried to hire a candidate, so they decided to try it out themselves. They realized that they weren't generally interested in this kind of business development. They just thought they wanted it because it was a black box with an aura of "things businesses should do" around it.
He also says that having all the employees do tech support to begin with made it a lot easier to hire dedicated support people, because then the people doing the hiring had a very clear idea what they needed.
We're talking about key roles, not support roles. Lawyer is not a key role unless you're building a patent troll firm, and in that case you damn well better know how to litigate yourself.
Start-up founders will have signed (and presumably read) quite a few legal documents (and even written a few themselves) before they hire a real lawyer. They should have had a real lawyer look over a few things first (on a consulting basis), as may be required by their E&O insurance, but they will have done quite a bit of "lawyerish" work themselves.
They may have also emptied the bins, unplugged the toilets, watered the potplants, and done a lot of other routine maintenance work.
There are very few jobs that can't be done (to a certain extent) by a non-professional. Practicing medicine is one obvious professional-only profession, but even then there are gray areas. Before you hire a company doctor, should you look into getting a sick bay, and doing a first aid course?
The first one makes sense from a practical point of view but still I find it quite depressing.
"If you don't know how to do the job right, you don't know how to hire for it."
This means that if you work for them you will do things which they could also do (possibly better), they just don't have time for it. Basically you are selling your time.
"do only what only you can do" (Dijkstra) and all that ...
* Don't hire until you've had to endure the pain of doing the job well yourself. If you don't know how to do the job right, you don't know how to hire for it.
* Don't hire just to capture talent. You'll only end up alienating the talent.
* Stay as small as you can.
* The resume form makes everyone look good, which means it doesn't tell you anything useful.
* Cover letters on the other hand tell you lots, and, incidentally, also tell you how well people can write.
* Sometimes the best candidates distinguish themselves with effort. Their most recent designer hire made this mini-site while applying: http://jasonzimdars.com/svn/
* Questions are good, but beware people who ask too many "how do I...?" questions as opposed to "why...?" questions.
* Test drive if you can. They hired designers for 1-week projects at $1500 before extending FT offers.
* Be flexible about where you hire (they're all over the place), if you can.