Is it Hiring or Speed Dating? 🍹

When it's a matter of human relationships, can we or - should we - be really scientific?

🧪️ Expectations vs Reality

At the very beginning of my career I got an interview at Google, and remember distinctly thinking ‘this is going to be the most important interview I will do in my life’'.

Pretty dramatic, I know. I was 21 though.

I completely flunked it - I just hadn’t prepared well or knew enough to really do the job.

Of course it was a huge bummer.

But I left that day thinking I was going to get naturally better as I got more experience.

Only, that wasn’t true.

As time passed, as I also got experience as a hiring manager, I became overconfident on levelled off in my performance during interviews.

I got a huge amount of rejections and did my share of hiring mistakes.

It took me over thousands of hours over the course of 13 years to figure out what I was doing wrong in job interviews, both as a recruiter and as a candidate.

What had I done to really understand how I was performing in interviews both as a recruiter and candidate?

Nothing.

So then I decided to change that, and analyse all of the mistakes I had made.

My findings boiled down to this:

1. If you don’t measure and optimise your performance you can still do pretty badly after a lot of practice. You look for confirmation bias in your method.

2. If you don't realise that it's not a scientific process, but about building relationships, you may never understand what you're doing wrong.

Hiring vs Speed Dating 🤔

So then I thought. Isn't hiring similar to speed dating?

🔢 It's a numbers/probability game - It hugely varies by role, country and so on, but there is 1.2% chance of landing a specific offer and about 4% of hiring the best person for a role.

☝️First impressions count - They say it all happens in the first 9 seconds. Whether that's true or not, you often start dating/interviews with the other part knowing little about you and forming their opinions very early on, and then trying to confirm them.

⌚ Time - In both activities, you usually have a very short time to decide whether you want to keep going out with that person. Hiring is like going from a speed date to marriage, given you don't have a year before thinking of moving in together.

🗺️ Background and Interests - Whether it's in a dating app, or through network, you always check that the past experience fits; in dating it's about common interests, in hiring it's the company pedigree that should mean the hiring company shares those value and ambitions. Do you want to have kids or explore the world in a tent?

🪞Egocentrism - Usually, it's easier to like someone that has a similar culture, geographical provenance, because it will be easier to find common ground. In hiring, that opens up a classic mistake of trying to look for your 'mini-me' (i.e. someone with exactly your skills, personal traits, etc) instead of looking for diversity and complementarity in teams.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Friends are important - Dating apps like Tinder have a harder time converting in true romance. The same goes for hiring; almost everyone prefers candidate referrals because you can leverage deeper insider/historical knowledge about the person - it's a head start.

🤖 Algorithms are trying to do this for you - Applicant Tracking Systems, Video Interviews - AI is doing a huge amount of the process. But as we know, it's not perfect - it can learn biases, create echo chambers and so on.

Things I learnt in the process

1. 📚 Preparation - As a candidate, I've prepared inconsistently. More often than not, I thought just my knowledge would have been sufficient. I was wrong; I saw a huge correlation between performance and quantity and quality of preparation I put in. As the interviewer, I mostly went in with my usual questions and approach. And yes, that was working, but the times I prepared more prior to the call, with ad-hoc questions based on the person, not just the role, the better outcomes I had vs trying to do it on the fly.

2. 😒 Motivation I often interviewed people I wasn't convinced about fully. That was a waste of time. The rule should be: ‘Hell Yes!’ or No.

3. 🔇Communication - I have grown a lot in my career, I like communicating. I thought that equaled being a great communicator. I was wrong and nobody was telling me clearly enough. As a candidate, I didn't get to the point concisely enough. As an interviewer, I didn't adapt the style and questions enough.

4. 🙅 Chemistry and Culture - I thought everything was scientific. I over rationalised it. I was wrong. It is a human to human interaction and getting both the chemistry, and culture right, is crucial and that's tough to do in a short time frame. This is something I learnt you can do some things to improve, but for others it's just like dating - some things are just unexplainable.

5. 🛸 Hiring in the Metaverse - Interviews used to be face to face. Now they're all video calls. That changes a lot, yet I often didn't take that into consideration. Body language usually plays a big part in relationships, and this is almost removed from this experience. Is it possible to do without ever meeting the person face to face?

Is this the future of hiring?

Steps I took to improve💡

1. Motivation: Double-check if it’s worth it - Spend more time reading the job description and researching the company if you don’t know it. Spend more time reading and researching about the candidate. Get to the real motivations by understanding the person you have in front of you, avoid flattery.

2. Prepare: Make checklists - You should build your own checklist for every application (can be generic, but some have to be quite specific) of things you need to prepare on / rehearse and ask candidates. You should think of it more like studying for an exam and have a list of things you should rehearse. This will make a huge difference. Here's a great example one for communication.

3. Time: Make time in your calendar - Sounds simple enough, but how many times do you actually block time in your calendar to do this? I mostly jumped to the calls and tried to do it on the fly.

4. Measurement: Feedback, Peer and Self-Review - Have you ever had a mock interview with a friend, colleague or professional to get feedback? Have you ever recorded yourself to see how you ask or answer questions? I did it and for example, learnt the rule of 3 in communication.

📌 Takeaways

As always, I try to summarise the main points of the article in this final section.

This should be useful for the reader, but it is also a reality check for me to understand if what I have written makes sense from top to bottom 😅

So, if you are in a hurry, that's what you should remember:

1. Job interviews don’t test just professional experience - they test your reasoning, communication and job interviewing skills and how strong emotional connection you can build in a short time. If you enter this perspective, you will change what you do.

2. Research and be extremely selective - Otherwise you will just be wasting time and become dissatisfied. This is increasingly important in a globalised job market. Be ready to take the time and be on the lookout for your blind spots and how you can continuously improve in the process.

3. Measure, measure, measure - We measure everything, so why don't we measure hiring? For the short term, you can do this by sending surveys at the end of interviews both as a recruiter or candidate. In the longer run, you can track decisions made, criteria you used and when they were successful or not. When you said you needed absolutely a particular skill - did it end up being true? In your current team, do the best performers have the skills or pedigree you're looking for?

4. It's a lot less scientific than you would hope - all human cognitive fallacies, biases and emotional components have the most weight versus actual skill sets. Especially in an extremely competitive world where skills are getting commoditised.

5. Switch the perspective - If you're the candidate, get inside the interviewer's head and figure out what she/he is looking for. If you're the interviewer, try and do the same. Like in Chess, this will help you think of the opponent's next move.

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Ciao! 👋 I’m Matteo, thanks for reading!

I’m on a journey to take learnings from my 13+ year experience in career management, hiring, and growth. I publish them as advice for those just starting or following a similar path.

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