Harvard Business Review Panel on Hiring Superstars from 2015 SXSW Interactive

I was lucky enough to be able to attend SXSW’s Interactive Festival this year. Below are my highlights from a great panel hosted by Harvard Business Review and moderated by hbr.org’s Editor Katherine Bell (@katherineabell) on how to hire superstars. These are based off of notes of their quick-fire chat, so while I am attributing these statements to them, I wholeheartedly admit that I could have transcribed something in error when writing down these notes. My apologies in advance to these great panelists if I did.

Thomas Chamorro-Premuzic (@drtcp)
International authority in psychological profiling, consumer analytics, and talent management. CEO of Hogan Assessments. Business Psychology Professor at University College London & Columbia University.

• The three attributes of a high potential hire are (1) smarts, (2) work-ethic and (3) likability. This brought up a lot of debate in the room. So much that I’ve written a follow-up post on it.
• Ethnicity, race and sex are not the diversity that really matter. Psychological diversity matters. Variety in styles, abilities and skills matter. Similarities in values are super important.
• Interviews are extremely unreliable. Studies show it is 10% more accurate than chance. Useful mostly to evaluate social skills, but studies show narcissists and psychopaths interview extremely well.
• Big difference between confidence and competence.
• For hiring, the best psychological tools are based off of 3 rules: People are different / People are consistent / People are predictable. Some new approaches to testing for hiring revolve around big data (internally capturing data in an organization), external social media capture of relevant data and “gamify-ing” hiring exams.
• Not everyone is moved by money. It’s all relative. Studies show people would rather get a 5% raise if they are the only one to get a raise than get a 20% raise if everyone else got a 30% raise.

Patty McCord (@pattymccord1)
Founder — Patty McCord Consulting. Executive coach. Netflix’s Chief Talent Officer from 1998–2012. Author of “How Netflix Reinvented HR,” (HBR’s most-read article of 2014).

• ABR: Always Be Recruiting.
• There is a fly fishing approach to finding talent. In fly fishing, you find your small spot that delivers great fish. Far more effective than fishing in the big lake with everyone else. So pick a niche and work the hell out of it. A good example today in tech is women. Meet a talented women and ask them about 10 other talented women they know. One of the biggest under represented niches in tech right now.
• Try and build your team around what your product’s consumers look like.
• Include in your interview panel people who have an internal track record of hiring successful people.
• (In reference to trial programs at companies, like Zappos who offers new hires a buyout to leave): It’s about understanding your workforce. Zappos does it because the company seems cool from the start but some people start and realize they hate feet or shoes. And Zappos wants to see those people go.
• (On the difficult conversations you must have with employees who have done well within their roles, but growth/scale requires someone with a different skillset in that role): You don’t keep a culture. You can’t put it in a box and tape it up. It changes; it won’t be the same at 30 people vs 300. You need different things at different times. Need to stop considering those conversations to be so difficult. You make them easier by having those conversations.

Craig Walker (@cwalker123)
Founder & CEO — Switch Communications. Co-founded UberConference in 2012 with $18 million from Google Ventures & Andreessen Horowitz. Involved in the launch of Yahoo! Voice & Google Voice.

• Give me the smart scrappy guy over the rockstar on paper all day. When times get rough, the smart scrappy guy will still be there.
• I spend 50% of my time recruiting. You have to if you want to be successful at it.
• Culture is so important. The more genuine the culture, the more responsibility they get and want. Room for growth and responsibility; those things are “honey to the bee”. This is so important when you are hiring them to work harder for less money as a startup or small organization. The right people will want that growth and responsibility over being engineer 45 on some feature.
• (On finding talent) Personal references from team always the best. Talent is always hearing how great the recruiter’s companies are. We also do hackathons & VC events.
• (On what kind of organization they prefer) Full meritocracy. Only thing I care about is are you going to help this ship win?
• (On dry runs for hiring) We do it for customer service and sales. More difficult for engineering. They tend to have 4 other offers and they aren’t going to put them on hold for a dry run.
• Letting people go is always the worst job. But I’ve never let someone go and then considered it a mistake. If you are not letting go of people you should or you are afraid to fire, you are doing the rest of the organization a huge disservice. Everyone that is not contributing the same is bringing the rest of the team down (they’re still getting the yearly raise, etc). Hire fast; fire faster.