[bitexploder]

A few words on top grading. We are use a top grading like process, and are pretty flexible on the references part of it. It is just a long conversation. I think it is a structured and simple way to talk about a person and where they have been. Yes, it is comprehensive, but it works well. We hire almost all candidates that have made it to the top grading stage of our hiring process. We don’t use it to find liars and don’t think of it like that. What it really is good at is finding patterns of behavior in someone’s life and work history. It’s not full of campy dumb mental problem questions. You just talk about yourself and your work history and how you relate to previous colleagues and managers. And it’s done consistently to make it a little more comparable from one person to the next. The reference checks are one of the most useful and valuable parts of the whole process (we are flexible here, we are a small company). I can see how this process could get morphed into something less friendly, but at the end of the day it’s a huge time investment for us and the candidate so we don’t embark upon it lightly. I haven’t found a better interviewing technique that takes the pain out of it for the employee and the employer. Our team all appreciated the process and we take their feedback seriously. We don’t follow all of the steps in top grading religiously, but the interviewing process is really good. We also read a lot of other books on building a hiring process and settled on top grading as the most consistent and logical. The few people we didn’t hire threw up major red flags in their interview process in terms of how they would fit in at the company and the work we do. How else should a company hire people? For a small business we try to de-risk the hiring process as much as possible because mishiring is /extremely/ painful. We have grown from 3-20 people organically. Each hire we made was and is very important to our growth and stability.

Edit: just wanted to say I am a partner/founder at my company and we deeply give a shit about what we do and who we work with. Our turnover across 7 years is very, very low. We strive for a good work life harmony with everyone that works with us. You have to have some process to fit people into a company and that means you gotta talk to people and get to know them. The goal is to eliminate interviewer bias as much as humanly possible after the technical screening. So it goes. Not everyone can be pleased and I would defend our hiring practices as very reasonable and humanistic in an otherwise crazy tech interviewing system at the FAANGs of the world.

[Psychlist]

What you do sounds like a reasonable interpretation of top grading. It's also what I'm used to, largely.

Where it gets tricky is with people like who are older and have "done interesting things". I did short contracts for more then a decade and interspersed them with cycle touring. So my full work history is a thing of joy and beauty, but asking me to go through it and re-locate one person from each company, contact them, and get a reference... you've just asked me to do 100 hours work at the very least. Even leaving out the non-technical jobs only halves the number. When a major bank wanted a list of every place I've lived for the last ten years they eventually decided that "no fixed address" was acceptable.

But I expect that if I applied to you and said "here's the last ten" you would be happy with that. And FWIW I have a number of quite enthusiastic referees available on request.

[bitexploder]

We just want two references and a warm introduction to them. We pick what we think is the most relevant recent experience and negotiate from there, being sensitive to availability etc. Doing it for every job and asking the candidate to do it is kind of lazy in our opinion. It’s just a logistical chore to set up a meeting. All we need is the intro for context :)

[DenisM]

So, do you actually ask the candidate to arrange calls with ex-managers and conduct these calls for all previous jobs? What does it mean that you are "flexible"?

[bitexploder]

We generally ask for two references and a warm introduction to each reference. We take it from there. We aim for more recent references. Doing it for all previous jobs is overkill and time consuming. The feedback is generally candid and useful. In some cases (limited work history) we only follow up on one reference. In others the best reference is also the current employer so that obviously can be tricky. The spirit of it is indeed to validate the interview process but also to gain a different perspective.

[proximitysauce]

I think it's important to understand that you're asking candidates to burn "social capital" by arranging those introductions. I've worked for pretty high end people (successful founders, ceos...). I'm not going to call in any favors from them for a job interview. Most senior people feel the same way. Don't ask your candidates to expend their own personal or social capital.

[ghaff]

It feels like even a fairly benign implementation of interviewing references wouldn't scale very well. It's something I might impose on a couple of people I knew well once for a special opportunity but expecting them to repeatedly do this for a bunch of companies using this process seems unreasonable.

And as others have said, while I could provide references going back quite a few years, it definitely wouldn't be every job since high school--even every professional job.

[bitexploder]

We tend to only ask for two references and it is negotiable. References from the distant past aren’t useful because our goal isn’t to “find liars” as some people suggested. It’s to get an unbiased perspective from someone other than the candidate. FAANG interview system takes way more man hours per candidate than our system.

[bitexploder]

I think this makes it overly difficult to fully vet candidates. Like I wrote before, we have had long discussions with our current team about our hiring system and the feedback is overwhelmingly positive. We try to take care in the whole process and honestly, if someone feels what we are asking is too much, they don’t have to complete the interview. We explain the steps up front before anyone commits any time or “social capital” to our process.

[proximitysauce]

If only people who agree to it make it through, then I'm not surprised the feedback is positive. What you're missing is all of the senior people who would never do this (which is a lot of them).

I'll also add that it's not hard to vet candidates. I've hired dozens and dozens of great people and never ask for references. Interviewing is a skill all managers should develop and excel at.

[DenisM]

What is your take on "bad hires"? bitexploder said those are very difficult to deal with, but I'm not sure it has to be. If someone lied significantly during the interview and it came up later that's pretty easy to fire that person later.

[ramraj07]

To someone wanting to learn what this method means (the good parts), what resources would you recommend?

[bitexploder]

We used their website/web app for a while but didn’t get enough value out of it. We had a hiring consultant / coach teach us about top grading after going through many other books.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/915182.Topgrading Is the best book on it. I would just say to use common sense when reading it and think about how you would feel in the interviewees shoes. There is also top grading for sales which has some good stuff in it too. We don’t collect detailed salary info (legal minefield anyway these days). We usually just do one interview and not multiple. There are decent videos in YouTube. They try to sell you on their website and branded materials, but it’s pretty simple for a small company to keep it light and in text documents or whatever you prefer.

[sibeliuss]

Top grading seems like a much more humane way to hire than obscure algorithm tests, even if it is more involved.

Thanks for dropping in the defense here, I've never heard of this process.

[bitexploder]

No problem. Ultimately I think the hiring process and what it becomes at large companies will reflect their values, for better or worse. They often start off with good intentions, but unchecked hiring processes can become very cynical and, well, Dystopian, as the parent article points out.

[jp_sc]

So... are you hiring right now?

[bitexploder]

Generally, yes. https://carvesystems.com/careers — we are an information security consultancy. Our tech interview is a take home test similar to a CTF. It can be somewhat time consuming for someone with minimal infosec experience. Just check that page out and shoot us an email (and mention you are from HN, and I can chat further with you if you are interested).