Hiring and judging character

Last substantive revision: 2015-06-21

• We Can’t (Simply) Buy Capacity
• the connection between hiring people for a job and judging the character of people fascinates me (e.g. for finding good friends, or for romantic relationships).
• both are clearly important: you need to hire people to get tasks done, and you want to find good friends/partner(s)
• both can take quite a bit of commitment to accurately judge
• both can end disastrously (due diligence)
• in both scenarios, there can be multiple people doing the judging, so there can be some gossip among those “in the know”
• sometimes it can be really hard to tell the difference between someone who is an extremely good fit, and someone who is a terrible fit.

• How do you distinguish 10X software engineers from the rest?

  • Yishan Wong:

    Look to referrals of referrals. Look for the best person according to the best person according to the best person you know (yes, that’s two levels). If there is consensus among several of your best people, this is a fairly reliable indicator. It is difficult to go more than 3x per “link” though - people are typically unable to discern the difference between someone 9x as good as they are from someone who is 3x as good as they are; this is why you have to do the “best person you know” referral twice. First, you hire all the best people you know, work with them for awhile to find the best amongst them, and then find all the best people they know. It is a multiple-stage approach; many people don’t know this, and just assume that “refer the best people you know” is the end of it.

    Similarly, stalking someone’s friends might be useful if you want to determine their character.

• many more Quora questions about judging character (many by Alex):

  • How to evaluate someone’s ability to be an exceptional judge of character
  • Is Elon Musk an exceptional judge of character/talent?
  • How can you become a good judge of character?
  • How do you judge people’s character?
  • decent answer: Sridatta Thatipamala’s answer to How can you become a good judge of character?

  • How do I judge the character of a lady/girl?

    • observing ppl under stress might be important

• one important question: does the person have the same life goals as me?

• “Are you at peace with your past romantic partners? Do you feel at peace with their joys though the joys may be mutually shared no longer?” (source)

• Yishan Wong(source):

  the lesson here is that sometimes “10x people” are so good that they don’t really look for jobs in the same way other people do, so you kind of have to find them via unorthodox means […] [Y]ou often have to make your job posting indicate a bit of quirkiness in just the right way so that it happens to stick out to them when they’re casual perusing job ads

  […]

  the main idea is to visualize the personality and character of the type of people you want to hire, and then put a message out publicly that only those types of people will respond to or provide a correct answer to.

• GiveWell has The process of hiring our first cause-specific Program Officer. Talking about senior hiring, they list some general principles:

  • The best way to evaluate someone is to work with them. The ideal way to make a senior hire would be to have a longstanding relationship with someone, perhaps as a part-time consulting arrangement.
  • Interviews are highly unreliable. The evaluation process should be designed as much as possible to mimic working together.
  • References are extremely important, and it can be useful to talk to many people about the candidate (including people who weren’t specifically offered as references).

  Also:

  When a candidate didn’t mention a major aspect of the criminal justice reform field, we would ask about it and see whether they were omitting it because they (a) had strong knowledge of it and were making a considered decision to de-prioritize this aspect of the field; (b) didn’t have much experience or knowledge of this area of the field.

  (So the general lesson here might be “do your homework” before trying to hire people.)

• Why Not To Break Up With Friends

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