<story><title>How to hire low experience, high potential people</title><url>https://worktopia.substack.com/p/how-to-hire-low-experience-high-potential</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>We built Fly.io resume-blind and without interviews, hiring people at every level of experience without having to make decisions based on that experience. We did it by throwing away all this stuff, ditching interviews, and replacing them with work-sample tests. Some of the best people on our team, the best I&amp;#x27;ve worked with in my whole career, are working here in their first job in our field.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m a little grumpy about this &amp;quot;diamonds in the rough&amp;quot; shit. I&amp;#x27;m more concerned about what&amp;#x27;s lurking in the diamond mines. If people can demonstrate that they can do the work, I don&amp;#x27;t much need to know if &amp;quot;they have a chip on their shoulders&amp;quot;. More generally: I have zero faith in anyone&amp;#x27;s ability to learn much from psychological interviews.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>swozey</author><text>So you communicated via email and the only consideration was the quality of their sample?&lt;p&gt;Nobody at any point literally spoke to this person?&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve had a ton of issues at my corp of people having other people handle their interview questions, code, or having AI listen to the conversation and answer questions by text as if we prompted it. Then they show up online after being hired and they have webcam problems or never go on cam, talk as little as possible, basically never communicate to anyone really, miss a lot of meetings, etc.&lt;p&gt;We&amp;#x27;ve had probably 5 instances of this last year we&amp;#x27;re absolutely super strict about things now. Our assumption is that they want to get in, potentially get any bonuses if there are any, get a few huge (for their call center) paychecks until they get caught. Do no or almost no work. And it&amp;#x27;s a call center you can sometimes hear tons of convos going on in the background so they&amp;#x27;re just doing this en masse.&lt;p&gt;This is happening ALL over since covid. I think some of them may have even filed unjust termination sort of things to the workforce commission but I may be wrong. Huge companies are dealing with this at a really rough scale.</text></comment>
<story><title>How to hire low experience, high potential people</title><url>https://worktopia.substack.com/p/how-to-hire-low-experience-high-potential</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>We built Fly.io resume-blind and without interviews, hiring people at every level of experience without having to make decisions based on that experience. We did it by throwing away all this stuff, ditching interviews, and replacing them with work-sample tests. Some of the best people on our team, the best I&amp;#x27;ve worked with in my whole career, are working here in their first job in our field.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m a little grumpy about this &amp;quot;diamonds in the rough&amp;quot; shit. I&amp;#x27;m more concerned about what&amp;#x27;s lurking in the diamond mines. If people can demonstrate that they can do the work, I don&amp;#x27;t much need to know if &amp;quot;they have a chip on their shoulders&amp;quot;. More generally: I have zero faith in anyone&amp;#x27;s ability to learn much from psychological interviews.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>strich</author><text>In a world where chat gpt exists I think even work samples are untrustworthy sources of excellence unfortunately.
It would seem one has to either watch the process or devise unique and difficult to game tests.</text></comment>