Hiring is a mess, but candidates could fix it.

That’s what I think, after 17 years of occasionally interviewing candidates, and trying to learn new strategies and reading the next cool Medium post about it.

I’ve been lucky enough to not have been through an interview as a candidate, ever. As a consequence, though, I’ve struggled a lot when I had to do the interview to grow our team.

I soon found out that hiring is hard. And it’s opaque, stressful and mostly inaccurate.

Interviewing for our tech team I tried anything I came across: whiteboard coding, home assignments, tests, quizzes, multiple interviews, the works. One thing, though, I think I learned:

It’s the candidate that has the power to make the interview easy and almost obsolete.

Personal branding, yey!

Here’s the thing: you don’t know the guy. You shake hands, you talk for one hour or two. You go through her CV (which is pretty much always a neat sequence of bullet points detailing grandiose accomplishments), try to understand what’s true from what’s just a pretty picture. You give her some exercise. Review it.

It’s automated. It’s dehumanizing. You don’t get to know the guy. She might seem a cultural fit. She might seem to know her shit. You just run through a checklist of questions or techniques, maybe try something new. But do you know what she’ll be like when things get tense? Is she somebody who really wants to help the colleagues, ora just thinks for herself? Is she inspired by what you do? Does she believe what you believe, or is she here for the money?

So how do we fix this? Here’s what my intuition says are the best two scenarios:

1. We don’t do lengthy interviews. We prepare small, self-contained tasks. We assign them to the candidates — pre-filtered based on the presumed set of competences. Paid gigs. And then we have a good sense of what she’ll do once on board.
2. Candidates have built a personal brand.

Paid gigs as interviews

Sounds a lot like an internship, but on a super small scale. The problem here is that it’s difficult to have enough self-contained, manageable tasks fit for this process. And than somebody in the organization must be assigned full time to this. Might not be feasible in small teams, though.

Build a personal brand

But what if you could know a candidate well before you meet him? Imagine if she was an active contributor to an open source project; or if she’s documenting online the process of learning game theory; if she’s an active member of some organization or she has thousands of followers on Facebook as an amateur bread maker, where she helps people in the delicate art of baking.

You’ll see if she’s passionate. What she cares about. You’ll know if she’s able to actually hustle, put in the effort and make something. If she’s dedicated, if she’s not distracted by some novelty and sticks to her cause.

Of course you’ll still have to learn if she has that technical skill you require, but I think that’s the easy part. It’s so easy that sometimes it’s irrelevant: a true committed and passionate person can learn and eventually master anything I’d throw at her no problem.

So here’s the punchline: if a candidate has spent time and dedication to build herself a personal brand I think that hiring would be fixed for good.

It would be about companies competing to get the best available on the market, about figuring out if her values match those of the company. Candidates would create scarcity even if there wasn’t.

And I think that hiring would be fun, too!