[lsc]

My problem is recognising tallent outside of your core compentencies.

If you can recognise tallent, it's easy enough to pick up people who are on the rebound from bad jobs, or who haven't gotten much paid experience yet. I regularly hire friends of friends, but then I hang out with very technical people who have very technical friends. I've picked up a lot of really good technical people with little experience and paid 'em $15/hr to work for me... most of them leave for better pay after a year or so, but if I was compitent at business, I'd be able to pay them more by then.

My big problem is that if you are incompetent at something, you can't reconise compitence. I am an incompitent business person, so I can't recognise a good sales/businessperson. Even with a good solid technical team, you need business compitency to succeed, and there isn't much of that in my social circle, and even if there was, I wouldn't be able to tell the good from the pretenders.

It sounds like I need to get together with someone like you, but who? I mean, I alrealdy said, I can't tell if someone is a compitent businessperson, and having the wrong CEO is much worse, imo, than having no CEO at all.

[aaronblohowiak]

recognizing talent is one thing that humans are amazingly bad at, as recent HN stories about malcom's new book and the nytimes article about competent vs nice coworkers have suggested.

i dont know if an iterative model can work in staffing.

this is why experience is so valued by companies -- if you've done stuff, then you are able to do stuff (though, maybe you're a big faker who got lucky.)

[lsc]

I think recognizing talent in the context of an interview is difficult, but not impossibly so. I think judging how well they work, (do they 'get stuff done') is much more difficult during interviews, unless the person has solo projects. I know working for others, I've recommended several 'smart but useless' people after interviewing. Usually when hiring people I know, though, I know in what ways they are useless, and can hire for positions where I can make up for their weaknesses.

but I don't think it's difficult to judge a person if you have known them for a while, especially if you are the type to talk about technical things in social contexts.

I think the problem appears when you are judging things outside your field, or people you only see for an hour.

[aaronblohowiak]

Yes, agreed. I should have specified the scope limitation to my statement of the interview context.