The Best Hiring Tip
When you're growing, you're always looking to hire great people and identifying the wheat from the chaff is pretty much a subjective guess for most people (except the rockstars who come in by reference, of course). Here's what doesn't really work:
* How many golf balls can you fit into a school bus (who cares?)* CV's (people lie) and reference checks (everyone knows 2 people they like)
* Where do you see yourself in... (again, who care? Question is: will you get there?)
* Greatest achievements (You're now trying to hire the best BS artist) I'm not asking you to totally disregard all of these. But you need a solid dependable question you can casually throw in once the prospective employee has been asked the usual golf-ball-where-do-you-see-yourself questions and you're still confused. Or perhaps when you're scoping a prospect and they don't even know it yet (always be hunting for talent!) So now for the good part: what really works, almost always. Here's the best question to * What have you done outside of work/school that you are the most proud off? When you ask people about what they're willing to do for free, on their own time, their passions are on display. Really good programmers, designers, business people always have a blog they're really proud of, a project they did that never worked out or that iphone game they're working on right now. These are hackers, You hire them. People who haven't done much usually answer with lame excuses like charity work (most likely they spent one night feeding the homeless and are bragging about it since), 'consulting' for other people's projects, trips they took, etc. These are perfectly normal people who will not bring the passion your growing startup needs. This works about 90% of the time, but your mileage may vary.
