[BrookeTAllen]

Hi, this is Brooke, the original hiring manager. I'm new to HN so please excuse me if I violate protocol.

I agree, life is about treating people well. However, although I find hiring is probably the single most satisfying thing I did on my job, it was very hard emotionally because in the case of nearly everyone I don’t’ hire it is because they say “NO” to me, and boy, rejection hurts. But at least I have a job and my candidates usually don’t.

More later but first…

If my site is unresponsive there is this on slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/BrookeAllen1/brooke-allen-has-a-be... I've generalized my approach to hiring all sorts and describe it here: http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-... …

When I'm lucky enough to talk to programmers I'll describe it this way...

I don’t want to be stuck in Von Neumann’s bottleneck so rather than me processing candidates in series with the question “Who do I want to hire” I take an OO approach and send a different question, “Who wants to work for me?” to my candidates so they can work on it in parallel.

Since hiring is an elimination process I let them eliminate me in the first rounds. I don’t say “no” but I have to take a lot of it, which can be hard on the ego, particularly if I judge people too early and start to want one person over another. Desire is at the root of suffering. (Any fans of the move The Tao of Steve? Formula for getting the girl: 1) Be desireless. 2) Be excellent in her presence, 3) Let her desire you.)

I try to be the most flawed (e.g. honest) but-striving-to-be-excellent person I can be in front of my candidates and hope they will be the same for me (and magically they are). If we’re not going to be who we are before we start working together who do we plan on being afterward?

Because eliminating candidates is the name of the game, I concentrate on the negatives and that way there are only positive surprised later. Arguably many of my “best” candidates might eliminate themselves, but I’m not looking for the best – I can never afford them anyway – I am looking for the most appropriate for my budget, which I state early on and is almost never subject to negotiation. You cannot increases your desirability to offer to work for less, and if you are worth more than I can afford than I’m sorry, but I cannot afford you.

I want what I call hidden talent; those good at doing a job but bad at getting one. After all, the last thing I want you to be good at on my job is getting the next one. I'll help you find a better job before I hire you because afterward we've got to hunker down and get some friggin' work done.

Because I form an intentional temporary community of my candidates, and task them with something hard but meaningful that benefits them (like learning a new skill and/or helping each other find work) then by the time I say “yes” to someone everyone else agrees with the decision. In fact, in 10 years only once did a person tell me he thought I had made a mistake by not hiring him and the other candidates were so outraged they jumped all over him and one – who happened to be a lawyer – offered to defend me pro bono if he tried any funny business.

I never heard from him again but it is my great pleasure to say he is an exception in that regard and I count a few of the people I haven’t hired among my friends. This is a wonderful side-benefit because as I get older it is harder to make new friends, and it is certainly unwise to treat employees as friends as some do.

I seldom tell individual candidates what they did wrong, not because I am shy, but because it can be hard to take and I’m fairly tactless. However, I will offer a class on how to find work in which I anonymize specifics enough so as to benefit those who can identify themselves. Also, most people don’t do anything seriously wrong other than be unqualified or unlucky; no shame in that.

More later, if you’re interested.

After 30 years I’ve retired from the capital markets and they will do fine without me, but the markets for human capital are severely broken. Because I’m not ready to die, stop working, or give up on having a life's purpose, if you would like me to help you crack this nut then please do not hesitate in contacting me.

[reledi]

> hidden talent; those good at doing a job but bad at getting one

I really like this. If you're bad at getting a (good) job then employers safely assume you would also be bad at the job - it's too risky otherwise. But often that isn't the case, because there's a lot of "hidden talent".

What can we do to give those people a fair chance? We need effective ways to discover hidden talent. The process you described worked for you, but it doesn't seem practical. Too time consuming for both the employer and job seekers, and not rewarding enough for those who don't get a job out of it.

[namelezz]

Are there ways to help those talents get together and start their own companies? Otherwise, they may go to interviews and keep getting rejected.

[reledi]

That's a possibility worth exploring, especially with services like https://assembly.com popping up. Starting a company is still a huge risk compared to being an employee though, and a good employee might not make a good entrepreneur.

[Retra]

Do you think those people who are not good at selling themselves are going to be good at convincing people to buy their stuff?

[dllthomas]

That depends on why they're bad at selling themselves. For instance, if they get ridiculously self-conscious when the conversational focus is on them, that shouldn't get in the way of selling something else.

[owennoah]

Hi, I'm Noah and I head BD for Better Work World, the organization I have started with Brooke to help firms hire the way he did. As for the above comment, this is true but the larger point is that, if the job isn't explicitly a sales position or doesn't require gaining internal agreement (like, say, many managerial roles)`one's ability to sell one's self in an interview is somewhat irrelevant, wouldn't you agree? Think about it: if you are a coder and happen to have several social anxiety issues, you would probably be an awful interview. But who cares? The market for coders is so hot it seems that has been largely accepted, albeit implicitly, but for less hot positions, not so much. We believe candidates win and hiring managers win when you focus on getting people to DO the work as opposed to talk about doing the work. When Brooke hired this way he found people he would have never hired through reviewing resumes, so thats a win for both of them, and those whom he did not hire-- many of whom had been unemployed-- would usually quickly find jobs elsewhere because they were given the opportunity to do relevant work, network, etc. To me, that beats the standard, "what's your biggest weakness?" line of questioning any day of the week.

[HackerNewsWayne]

Did I read it right when you said you were hiring in Jan 2014, but retired in Feb 2014? May I know if the capital markets have become so broken too that you decided not to participate anymore? I think this will be helpful to all aspiring algo traders.

[BogdanCalin]

The hiring was made in 2004 not 2014.