[jacobian.org] interviewing for values,
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My posts
Here's what I published on my blog recently:
đź“ť Developing a Values Interview Question
How do you develop an interview question that measures a core value?
At a previous job, we had a core value we described as "bias towards action". This wasn't something cute-sounding that we put on the company website (you won't find it on the company site); it was a real value that guided our day-to-day work.
So when it came time to hire, we knew we needed to select people who'd align with this value. It was central enough to our way of working that someone who had a different way of working wouldn't have worked out. We wouldn't have been happy with someone who needed to find optimal solutions; they would have been miserable being asked to implement something that was merely okay. It's not that this value is "right" and that people who felt differently were "wrong" in some way. Other organizations -- other successful organizations -- work differently. But it was "right for us" at the time, and we needed to hire people who wanted to work this way.
This is a common challenge for organizations with a deeply-ingrained value like this. Other skills are easier to look for in interviews. You can assign work sample tests to assess job skills. You can ask questions about communication, collaboration, teamwork, conflict resolution, etc. But how do you develop an interview question that measures values?
đź“ť Book Review: Powerful (Patty McCord)
Patty McCord was Netflix's first head of HR and a member of its executive team for 14 years. She (along with Reed Hastings, Netflix's founder and CEO). She's probably best known as the co-author (with Hastings) of Netflix's famous Culture Deck, a 125-slide deck that lays out Netflix's unusual culture. Powerful is a deep examination of that culture and its ramifications. It's one of the better dissections of what "culture" really is and how it works. I recommend it to anyone in a position to influence company culture. You may or may not want to mimic Netflix, but thinking through which parts of Netflix's culture you do and don't want to mimic is an excellent exercise -- it certainly was for me.
Elsewhere...
🔗 Stay SaaSy: Working with Integrity — speaking of core values, I’ve been thinking lately about what “professionalism” means. I do think there are a set of mostly-unspoken professional norms, some basic expectations about how people should behave at work. At some point I want to take a shot and writing some of them down. Until then, this post by Stay SaaSy is a great start.
đź”— David R. MacIver: People don't work as much as you think
People don’t work nearly as much as you think they do, because everything we say about working hours is a fractal of lies [...], where everything is based on lies people tell about lies being told to them about… etc.
If you do not realise this, and assume that everyone who says they are working eight hours per day actually is, you are probably going to wreck your mental health trying to keep up with them. Stop it at once.”