Continuations

Last Uncertainty Wednesday considered how imperfect correlation is related to the narrative fallacy which in turn underlies observations such as the extravagant headquarters effect. Today I will examine why hiring is so ridiculously hard and even organizations which are very good at it will make their fair share of mistakes. The underlying reason for why hiring is hard is the base rate fallacy, which occurs when you update your beliefs too much on the basis of flimsy information. What do I me...

The last two posts on Tech Tuesday were both about growing your engineering organization. Someone wrote to me saying: it’s all well to talk about best practices for organizational design, but we can’t find enough qualified engineers in the first place! So today a post about hiring. I have been able to observe many companies over the years and even in the toughest markets some have a steady flow of high quality candidates and others always seem to struggle. The main distinction between the two...

The first startup I was involved with was a management consulting company in Germany. I had been out of college for less than a year when I joined four much more experienced guys in forming Bossard Consultants Germany (some initial funding was provided by Bossard France, a well established consulting firm there). We got off to a great start, landing some premier clients such as Lufthansa and Porsche. The firm grew rapidly and we hired a lot of very smart guys to join the team. Notice a patter...

I am a fan of using puzzles in interviews, especially for developers. But it is important to do it right and to draw the right conclusions. Here are some things that I have learned over the years. 1. Puzzles should be just one of many different parts of the interview. 2. Try to find a set of puzzles that works for you and use the same puzzles with many candidates to get better comparability. 3. Focus primarily on approach and behavior and only secondarily on outcome. 4. Unless the position sp...

Hiring is maybe the single hardest thing for any startup. Marc Andreesen has had a number of great posts about it. He covers interviewing in some depth, including the importance of planning out interview questions in advance. Something implied in Marc’s post but worth spelling out is the following – make sure to (1) have a decent number of candidates, (2) schedule interviews close together and (3) use at least some fixed set of interview questions with each candidate. Leave out any one of the...

We just announced on the Union Square Ventures blog that we are hiring for two positions: an Analyst and a General Manager of the USV Network.

This is the second post in my Scylla and Charybdis series on why startups are quite so hard. Up today: hiring. Here you can go wrong by hiring too fast but also by hiring too slow. The first problem of hiring too fast is fairly obvious. You wind up spending money too quickly. For most Internet startups payroll is the biggest fixed expense and it is far easier to hire than to fire, which winds up being a problem if raising money turns out to be harder than expected. But there are also more sub...