Excellent post, definitely in line with a lot of what I've learned and read about within organizational design, however I feel the need to disagree a bit with #6. There are a lot of incredibly talented people who are not always in demand, due to the systems and norms that prevent those people from being visible. I think about my own experience as someone who is not particularly good at networking or perhaps someone who may not be particularly good at the standard interview practices, but who would absolutely excel in their particular role or within the right culture.
I think our point was more specific around the hiring environment around layoffs. There's this perception that hiring is instantly way easier when big companies are laying off people, but we think this is a bit of a fallacy because there's lots of competition for these people.
I think there's a whole separate post in how to find less obvious candidates / avoiding biasing to "good interviewers". #10 sort of touches on this and it's one of the key reasons we do work trials. The people who shine often aren't necessarily the ones who shine in interviews.
I really love how you all approach hiring, and I think it's one of the closest I've seen on "how to do it right", but we're still far from addressing the many pitfalls that job seekers encounter that make the whole job search process a soul-sucking, infuriating, demoralizing experience. What would a "delightful" job search experience look like? If someone could figure that out, it would be a gamechanger.
I'm really intrigued as to what makes a candidate a "soft yes" at PostHog. I applied for a fullstack position at last month.
Sadly I wasn't selected for an interview. But would love to know what the reason behind it could be. I met all the qualifications on the role, including the nice-to-have.
I believe someone's been in touch now, but TL;DR sometimes it's just a timing thing... for example, if you apply when we already have several people in the late stages.
RE: soft yeses, it's more of a late-stage point when people are meeting / interviewing a candidate. Everyone brings their own perspective, so there's no universal standard of what a strong or soft yes is, though culture fit + skillset are obvious key points most people will factor into their assessments.
Excellent post, definitely in line with a lot of what I've learned and read about within organizational design, however I feel the need to disagree a bit with #6. There are a lot of incredibly talented people who are not always in demand, due to the systems and norms that prevent those people from being visible. I think about my own experience as someone who is not particularly good at networking or perhaps someone who may not be particularly good at the standard interview practices, but who would absolutely excel in their particular role or within the right culture.
Thanks and you make a great point.
I think our point was more specific around the hiring environment around layoffs. There's this perception that hiring is instantly way easier when big companies are laying off people, but we think this is a bit of a fallacy because there's lots of competition for these people.
I think there's a whole separate post in how to find less obvious candidates / avoiding biasing to "good interviewers". #10 sort of touches on this and it's one of the key reasons we do work trials. The people who shine often aren't necessarily the ones who shine in interviews.
I really love how you all approach hiring, and I think it's one of the closest I've seen on "how to do it right", but we're still far from addressing the many pitfalls that job seekers encounter that make the whole job search process a soul-sucking, infuriating, demoralizing experience. What would a "delightful" job search experience look like? If someone could figure that out, it would be a gamechanger.
Excellent post Andy!
I'm really intrigued as to what makes a candidate a "soft yes" at PostHog. I applied for a fullstack position at last month.
Sadly I wasn't selected for an interview. But would love to know what the reason behind it could be. I met all the qualifications on the role, including the nice-to-have.
Portfolio: https://marklyck.com
Any chance you could elaborate a bit on what results in a "soft yes" at PostHog? I would love to know what I could improve on in the future.
P.S. Keep up the excellent work at PostHog, still my goto analytics and feature flags solution.
I believe someone's been in touch now, but TL;DR sometimes it's just a timing thing... for example, if you apply when we already have several people in the late stages.
RE: soft yeses, it's more of a late-stage point when people are meeting / interviewing a candidate. Everyone brings their own perspective, so there's no universal standard of what a strong or soft yes is, though culture fit + skillset are obvious key points most people will factor into their assessments.
A lot of red flag in this post
I assume you're not referring to my opinions on watermelon! Care to expand? We're always interested in different opinions on what we do.