LW - How to hire somebody better than yourself by lukehmiles

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: How to hire somebody better than yourself, published by lukehmiles on August 29, 2024 on LessWrong.
TLDR: Select candidates heterogeneously, then give them all a very hard test, only continue with candidates that do very well (accept that you lose some good ones), and only then judge on interviews/whatever.
I'm no expert but I've made some recommendations that turned out pretty well -- maybe like 5 ever. This post would probably be better if I waited 10 years to write it. Nonetheless, I think my method is far better than what most orgs/corps do. If you have had mad hiring success (judging by what your org accomplished) then please comment!
Half-remembered versions of Paul Graham's taste thing and Yudkowsky's Vinge's Law have lead some folks to think that judging talent above your own is extremely difficult. I do not think so.
Prereqs:
It's the kind of position where someone super good at it can generate a ton of value - eg sales/outreach, coding, actual engineering, research, management, ops, ...
Lots of candidates are available and you expect at least some of them are super good at the job.
You have at least a month to look.
It's possible for someone to demonstrate extreme competence at this type of job in a day or two.
Your org is trying to do a thing - rather than be a thing.
You want to succeed at that thing - ie you don't have some other secret goal.
Your goal with hiring people is to do that thing better/faster - ie you don't need more friends or a prestige bump.
Your work situation does not demand that you look stand-out competent - ie you don't unemploy yourself if you succeed in hiring well.
You probably don't meet the prereqs. You are probably in it for the journey more than the destination; your life doesn't improve if org goals are achieved; your raises depend on you not out-hiring yourself; etc. Don't feel bad - it is totally ok to be an ordinary social creature! Being a goal psycho often sucks in every way except all the accomplished goals.
If you do meet the prereqs, then good news, hiring is almost easy. You just need to find people who are good at doing exactly what you need done. Here's the method:
Do look at performance (measure it yourself)
Accept noise
Don't look at anything else (yet)
Except that they work hard
Do look at performance
Measure it yourself. Make up a test task. You need something that people can take without quitting their jobs or much feedback from you; you and the candidate should not become friends during the test; a timed 8-hour task is a reasonable starting point. Most importantly, you must be able to quickly and easily distinguish good results from very good results. The harder the task, the easier it is to judge the success of top attempts.
If you yourself cannot complete the task at all, then congratulations, you now have a method to judge talent far above your own. Take that, folk Vinge's law.
Important! Make the task something where success really does tell you they'll do the job well. Not a proxy IQ test or leetcode. The correlation is simply not high enough. Many people think they just need to hire someone generally smart and capable. I disagree, unless your org is very large or nebulous.
This task must also not be incredibly lame or humiliating, or you will only end up hiring people lacking a spine. (Common problem.) Don't filter out the spines.
It can be hard to think of a good test task but it is well worth all the signal you will get.
Say you are hiring someone to arrange all your offices. Have applicants come arrange a couple offices and see if people like it. Pretty simple.
Say you are hiring someone to build a house. Have contractors build a shed in one day. Ten sheds only cost like 5% of what a house costs, but bad builders will double your costs and timeline.
Pay people as much as you can for their time and the...