I can confirm this works in my own experience of trial-and-error interviewing over 2000 applicants and hiring over 200 for my clients and myself (since ~2006).
Nearly 100% of the applicants were remote, so I think that helped me from falling into traps of poor "traditional" hiring practices.
The point of hiring these remote folks was to help accelerate whatever team I was on. It can be a great way to scale your existing team very quickly if you know how to do it.
For example, I took over an iPhone app dev team and it was taking them 4 months to produce an app. These apps were all very similar in functionality, but the developers were spending a ton of time slicing images, testing, and other tasks that remote workers could easily do. So I hired some remote staff (via oDesk) to do most of that supporting work and we got the app production time down consistently to 1 month. That was a huge ROI for the business since the total cost for all remote staff was the same as for 1 additional on-site engineer.
There's nothing magic about hiring well, but I've watched others try to hire remote staff and the vast majority of them try once, fail, and give up on it.
They will approach the hiring process in a traditional way (personally interview them to watch how they handle puzzles, etc). It's a grueling process and then they still get really poor hires and conclude that "outsourcing doesn't work".
It's most helpful to think of the process as panning for gold. (Naturally, I'm not saying that some people are more valuable than others innately, just that you're looking for those who are most valuable at performing your given tasks.)
So, to find gold, you must filter, filter, filter. That's the exact process for finding applicants that are high performers. Most of your applicants will be pretty terrible at the job you're hiring for, so the filtering process is critical for success.
- filter out the very worst applicants with a small easy question
- filter out the remaining applicants:
- pick a real-life production task you've recently completed
- ensure that the task is *exactly* what they'd be doing in the job
- have them perform the task
- compare their task results to your task results
- hire more than you need of the top performers
- filter out (gently fire) the ones that aren't as good
- repeat as needed until you have gold
When I see others attempt this, the most common problem is that they essentially go down to the river and just grab whatever pebbles they see in their first handful and hope there's gold in it (hire without filtering). Or they go down and carefully pick the prettiest pebbles hoping they will be gold (wrong filter / puzzle interviewing). But the only way to really find gold is to seriously invest in a filtering process that will yield actual gold. That means filtering based on their ability to do the actual tasks they'll be doing on the job.
The great thing about hiring remote folks is that I care 0% how they get the task done. I don't care if they've automated it, or have their mom do it for them, or whatever. If they provide the results I need, I'm happy, period.
There are plenty of other smaller caveats and gotchas to watch out for, but I'll try to cover those in a blog post sometime.
If you're a startup and want to go faster, try this out by off-loading some of the grunt work from your staff. It can be a big competitive advantage if you can do it right.
> - filter out (gently fire) the ones that aren't as good
God I would hate this. I'd rather be told that my work sucks, and shown examples of better work, so that I could actually improve and not just wonder if I was let go for some arbitrary reason. If I disagree with you BFD, life goes on, but I'd at least like to know if it was related to my output or not.
"Gently" just means that you are sensitive to the feelings of the person you aren't going to continue sending work to. That doesn't mean you can't tell them why. I often do tell them why - it really depends on how they took feedback earlier in the contract. If they are defensive and don't take feedback well, then I generally don't give them final feedback since they've made it clear they don't like it. However, if they've taken feedback well during the contract, then I give them final feedback that will help them improve and win future contracts.
The feedback I give is also gentle. Well, I guess everything is done gently. These are all good human beings your dealing with, so why not be gentle? Gentleness doesn't mean you aren't honest with them. It just means that you are considerate of their feelings when working with them.
They may have performed work for you, and they might not have gotten paid. You open yourself to so much liability it's not funny. A judge would look very unkindly to such practice.
OP was clearly talking about hiring people on odesk where different rules apply.
On odesk you hire people for projects of limited time.
He didn't mean that you don't pay the people you've hired if they do the work they promised - that will get you kicked out of odesk really quickly.
What he does mean by "gentle fire" is "don't hire them again for more work".
And that's how it's supposed to work: odesk freelancers have no right to expect being hired by you for second job if they didn't perform to your satisfaction on their first job, for which they were paid the amount they agreed to be paid (just to make this clear).
In practice, it usually means that I start sending more and more work to the better workers until there is little work left for the worker that doesn't perform as well.
I guess you could think of it like a load balancer distributing work. If there is a worker that is less responsive or sending poorer results than the rest, then you start sending less and less work to them. Ultimately, you run out of work for them since it's all going to the higher performers.
At that point, there's no point in continuing the contract with the lower performer. So, then I will let them know and end the contract and give them the best review and feedback I can while still being honest about their performance.
It's worth noting again that these are short-term part-time contracts, so this already fits within the contractor's expectations. They don't expect this job to last forever and they're generally not too heartbroken if a contract ends. They are often working on multiple contacts simultaneously, so mine is just one of several contracts.
Ultimately all contracts end, even for the best workers. The nice thing about hiring temporary contractors is that their expectations are already set that this is a temporary engagement.
"filter out (gently fire) the ones that aren't as good." If the employee finds out you "hire more than you need of the top performers", you end up with a potential court case.
If I found this out about a former employer, I would have pursued them to the end of hell.
Isn't this what the up-or-out policy at major consulting firms and investment banks is all about? I mean, it's not identical, but it's a similar idea. I assume that if sure that if firms like McKinsey are hiring/firing like this, it's not illegal.
Depends on timelines. The big places will keep you on for at least a year, possibly forever. Most small places can't afford to do more than a month on someone they don't like.
Remember that these aren't employees, but are temporary part-time contractors. It's not really "firing", but just ending the contract earlier for some than for others. All the contracts end ultimately, I just keep the best performers much longer than the lesser performers.
IANAL, and I'm just taking a stab in the dark here... But might it have to do with the work contract not being made in good faith?
That is in my basic understanding of contracts it is assumed as part of the contract that there is good will between both parties to fulfill what is set out in the contract. Practices such as these would indicate that the company has no actual intention of hiring the employee and is using the hire as an additional filter.
I suppose if the contract stipulated that there was a trial period or some such it might be a way to wiggle out of it. From a quick google search it seems you can either sue for Fraud (they advertised a permanent position and that wasn't the case, or they didn't make it explicit that the position was temporary) or Breach of Contract if they didn't specify that you were in a trial period.
Would love to hear from someone with better grasp of the situation.
In the US, generally people are employed at will (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-will_employment) which means an employee can be dismissed by an employer for pretty much any reason and an employee can leave their job for any reason, without any notice.
There's some exceptions (for example, discrimination) but you're free to take a job in bad faith too.
A job being at-will doesn't affect whether you can offer a job in bad faith. "At will" says you have the right to fire me for any reason. "Bad faith" means you shouldn't offer me the job in the first place unless you mean it. They affect two different actions.
Let's make an extreme example: I interview Anderson, Beth, and Charlee. I like Anderson and Beth, but Beth is a better fit for the team. Charlee is terrible.
Meanwhile, All three are interviewing with my competition. So... I give jobs to Anderson and Beth. I offer Anderson a very good salary just to make sure he doesn't go to the competition. They hire Charlee, and that's a win for me. Now I fire Anderson.
I suggest that if this was my plan all along, I wronged Anderson when I offered him a job in bad faith. I may not have wronged him when I used the "at will" provision to fire him, but I wronged him when I fraudulently offered him a job that I had zero intention of letting him earn the right to keep.
In Australia we have strong job protection including unfair dismissal laws which would obviously cover this scenario.
It's part of the balance between keeping a good economy and recognising that jobs aren't just profit generation for employers, but also the means by which people support themselves and their families.
I can't provide any specific laws, but the general objection is that they were hired in bad faith. If I hire 15 people with the intention of firing 5 of them (and don't tell them that), that's a dick move. I misrepresented their opportunity at my company.
It depends what you tell them. If you said, "I'm hiring you" and you expected to fire 5, that's a horrible move. But if you told them, "We have a contract for you now, and might have more work later." Now the fact that you're intending to give 10 of them full time jobs is a very nice move!
The difference is not just semantics either. If they have other work already, the odds that they accept your first contract will depend on what you told them at the start.
This can work if there is a large enough pool of quality applicants that are either currently unemployed or are already contractors. If they are contractors, they may not be seeking full time employment (they like the mobility of contracting). But if you want to recruit someone who has a full time job, lots of luck convincing them to leave a good position (or any steady position) for a 6-month contract that "may" turn into a full time job.
This is how I was hired at my current job though. I was laid off for a few months, and a contract to hire position opened up. I took it, because it was better than not working -- but I would have never considered it if I was working at the time (they ended making me a permanent offer after 3 weeks, instead of 6 months, and I really like the place, so it ended up working out).
I've used a very similar method for myself in hiring remote workers, although my ratios are more extreme. In some cases we tested over 200 people and selected one person for the job.
Have not used math questions at this stage as it seems a bit too obtuse and not to-the-point. Better to ask an actual coding question if you are hiring a coder. However I have had success in hiring people that have been involved in maths olympiads or also in coding competitions.
Nearly 100% of the applicants were remote, so I think that helped me from falling into traps of poor "traditional" hiring practices.
The point of hiring these remote folks was to help accelerate whatever team I was on. It can be a great way to scale your existing team very quickly if you know how to do it.
For example, I took over an iPhone app dev team and it was taking them 4 months to produce an app. These apps were all very similar in functionality, but the developers were spending a ton of time slicing images, testing, and other tasks that remote workers could easily do. So I hired some remote staff (via oDesk) to do most of that supporting work and we got the app production time down consistently to 1 month. That was a huge ROI for the business since the total cost for all remote staff was the same as for 1 additional on-site engineer.
There's nothing magic about hiring well, but I've watched others try to hire remote staff and the vast majority of them try once, fail, and give up on it.
They will approach the hiring process in a traditional way (personally interview them to watch how they handle puzzles, etc). It's a grueling process and then they still get really poor hires and conclude that "outsourcing doesn't work".
It's most helpful to think of the process as panning for gold. (Naturally, I'm not saying that some people are more valuable than others innately, just that you're looking for those who are most valuable at performing your given tasks.)
So, to find gold, you must filter, filter, filter. That's the exact process for finding applicants that are high performers. Most of your applicants will be pretty terrible at the job you're hiring for, so the filtering process is critical for success.
When I see others attempt this, the most common problem is that they essentially go down to the river and just grab whatever pebbles they see in their first handful and hope there's gold in it (hire without filtering). Or they go down and carefully pick the prettiest pebbles hoping they will be gold (wrong filter / puzzle interviewing). But the only way to really find gold is to seriously invest in a filtering process that will yield actual gold. That means filtering based on their ability to do the actual tasks they'll be doing on the job.The great thing about hiring remote folks is that I care 0% how they get the task done. I don't care if they've automated it, or have their mom do it for them, or whatever. If they provide the results I need, I'm happy, period.
There are plenty of other smaller caveats and gotchas to watch out for, but I'll try to cover those in a blog post sometime.
If you're a startup and want to go faster, try this out by off-loading some of the grunt work from your staff. It can be a big competitive advantage if you can do it right.