Don’t be cagey in interviews
Inoculation hiring can present a tension between a) giving the candidate the most robust info about your culture, expectations, and challenges that you can and b) getting trustworthy signal from them about how they’d do on the job.
This is likely to come up in work tests, where it can feel like you should hide the ball a little. You want to avoid getting back a response that has been tailored to match your expectations but doesn’t truly reflect how that person works.
If a premise of inoculation hiring is that candidates will tell you what you want to hear, shouldn’t you withhold some info about what you want to hear?
If you feel like you have to conceal your expectations, that likely means your work test is currently measuring who’s good at echoing your answer key. Unfortunately, concealment doesn’t fix that. Instead, it makes the test measure who’s good at guessing your preferences. But chances are that guessing ability is not a skill you’re hiring for.
The fix is to design a test where knowing exactly what you value doesn’t help them fake the answer.
A test is fakeable when the candidate can reverse-engineer an exemplary response from your stated preferences. A test is more robust to this kind of fakery when it reveals judgment and reasoning. You can get at those skills by presenting a genuinely messy situation that doesn’t have a clean answer, a tradeoff where you track how they weigh the options rather than which option they pick, or a scenario-based prompt that has a structure like: “here’s what happened, what would you do and why.”
If you notice that you’re wanting to be cagey, revisit the design of your test. Rebuild it so that you can evaluate their reasoning. That lets you offer full transparency about your expectations. The best candidates will distinguish themselves and you won’t have to worry (as much) that they’ve just sung you a song in your preferred key.
-ben
In praise of principles
This is not legal advice but it’s advice that might sound legal or lawyerly.
Your organization has its bylaws; it operates in a sector that’s regulated in some way by local, state, and federal codes. That’s the law law.
Beyond the law law, you might have an employee handbook that maps out board-approved policies on things like PTO, salary increases, and filing grievances.
Beyond written policies, you may also have a layer of cultural norms and guidelines that dictate things like default email response time. Around here, we reply within a business day, unless there are extenuating circumstances.
All of those layers of law, policy, and norm might not touch challenging, non-obvious decisions you have to confront on the regular. For those kinds of decisions, it can be useful to articulate a principle you want to shape the decision. Those principles can be broad and conceptual, especially in the early drafting phase. They can also become specific and quantitative when the situation calls for it.
Here are some signals that you might benefit from a principle:
You’re having a debate over and over about the same topic
You are the bottleneck on lots of decisions because you don’t trust the judgment of your peers or reports.
You notice a dilemma, especially a recurring dilemma, where values or policies you hold sit in tension with each other. It’s not obvious how you (or others) should adjudicate that tension.
-eric
Getting at the existential question
If you’re finding yourself frustrated over and over again with your own situation or with someone who reports to you, it can be useful to dig down to the existential question.
The existential question is something like “what would make me quit [this] altogether?”
[this] = this job, this working relationship, this company. Quitting it, if you’re the employer, could mean firing a report. It could mean enacting a succession plan. It could mean a hard pivot into a different line of business.
A less dramatic but still useful pair of follow up questions:
“How close am I to that (to quitting) right now?”
“Whatever my answer to the prior question, can I afford to quit?”
Repeated frustration can feel like a muddle or a game of painful increments. You start keeping score, possibly on metrics that don’t really matter.
The existential question can give you the clarity of a fork in the road. You’re not blistering your hands on 100 little dials, trying to wring satisfaction out of low-stakes moves. You’re choosing between (def)ending and building. You’re either gonna fire yourself (or that person) or you’re going to take the steps to make this go as well as it possibly can.
-eric
COMPELLING QUOTATIONS
Linguist John McWhorter on writing as a drug:
… the preference to see Marvel films captioned shows that our brains are still “on writing,” just as one can be on a drug. Literacy transforms how we process language. Once technology allows us to watch speech joined by its written equivalent, we embrace the writing — speech is completed if we see it simultaneously spelled out.
Critic Henry Oliver in the debate about the “death of reading”
What that old TV culture did do was to make it easier to be a passive high-brow. The internet still provides all of that content in podcasts, on YouTube, and frequently on Twitter feeds. It may stick in the craw of some people to admit this, but a lot of what they want is widely available and widely consumed. Whether it is less consumed than it used to be is harder to say. When most people turned off Clark and Bragg they went straight into The Generation Game rather than picking up Don Quixote. That they now flick over to Facebook or watch TikTok videos doesn’t, to me, seem to be a very significant difference.
Poet Mary Oliver on love and attention
If you love something, you give it a lot of attention. And if you give something a lot of attention, you very often learn to love it.