Find the right job. Hire the right person.
How to make a necessary but painful process deliver better results for everyone.
Someone doing a job they aren’t suited for is bad for everyone. They may be ill-suited in any number of ways – overqualified, underqualified, doesn’t like working from home, needs flexible hours, is poorly managed, or the worst of all: a bad cultural. Culture, after all, eats strategy for breakfast. Or so, allegedly, spake Peter Drucker (and every Silicon Valley penned business book ever since).
But whatever the root cause, this mismatch is a drag on an organisation’s performance, economic growth, and just plain old human happiness. The OCED reckons that around 40% of workers in developed economies are either over-qualified or under-qualified for their role. The World Bank estimates that global productivity could be as much as 12% higher if the right people were in the right jobs.
It’s clear that matching the right people with the right jobs is tough. But a growing school of thought says that much of the conventional hiring wisdom is often wrong.
It doesn’t have to be this way!
The GPI was started by a few of the people who work at Masika Ventures. In our day jobs, we have hired hundreds of people over the last decade. Through much hard work and some very hard-won lessons, we have iterated our way to something that works for us. Our method works particularly well at finding excellent, early career graduates who are just in need of an opportunity. Importantly, the unusual method itself gives applicants a window into the type of company they will be working in.
You can follow this link to a flow chart of the gory details of the process.
Or for the Cliff Notes, here are a couple key insights…
TL;DR
Cast your net wide. But filter quickly.
Jafar knew it. It’s all about the diamond in the rough so cast that net wide (or whatever you use to find diamonds). But you don’t want to clog your inbox with 1,000s of applications. So do not waste your time by asking people to email a CVs or even having a mailbox people can email at all. Get applicants to fill in a form, export the results to excel, and triage quickly.
Remember that the goal at the start is to not limit the number of applicants in any way. Make the job post as accessible as possible. We recommend expressly saying that female candidates are specifically encouraged to apply. Our research has told us that job posts that state this get more responses from women but don’t decrease the number of male respondents.
The questions in the form don’t need to be closely tied to the role you’re trying to fill. Test their diligence, probe their ability to learn. That may be getting harder with our good friend ChatGPT always on hand, but it’s far from impossible. When making your form, run a potential question through a LLM to make sure it can’t spit out a copy/paste-able correct answer. Visual questions remain hard for our AI overlords to always answer correctly, so use them.
One of our favourites is to provide a picture of a vernier calliper (an archaic measuring device) and ask the candidate to give the measurement shown. You can learn how to read the callipers with two minutes of googling or AI searching. But just copy/pasting the image into ChatGPT and asking the AI itself what the answer is, offers up the wrong answer.
Actual work is the key
Once you’ve triaged the wheat from the chaff (we aim for 20% wheat, 80% chaff), get your long list to do some actual work. We aren’t talking about unpaid labour here but the best way to find out if a candidate can do the potential job is to give them a small bit of that job – and see what they come up with. No need to make these too laborious. Aim for the task to take about an hour to complete if they know the subject well. If they don’t know the subject well, it should take them 4hrs with the boundless resources of the internet at their disposal.
If someone can learn how to do a task, that’s a good thing. You want that person on your team. If you are looking for a Procurement Officer, it doesn’t matter if they have a Procurement degree. What matters is that they can do the job of a Procurement Officer. The quality of their actual work tells you a lot more than the words on their CV.
Interviews are garbage
Job interviews tell you one thing about a candidate: if they’re good or bad at job interviews. Interviews are a skill, and it can be hard to determine if someone will be a good hire or if they just have experience in interviewing. If they are young, they likely will be nervous. The inevitable patchy quality of online calls shouldn’t bias you against a candidate. All judgements are of course subjective to some extent, but interviews are where we are most easily be led astray by our biases. Accordingly, the interview only accounts for 5-10% of the final tallying of scores.
The above system is no panacea. But for finding motivated university graduates who are keen to learn new skills, it’s worth a try. Not all the received wisdom about hiring and job searching is wrong but enough of it is, and the results are so mixed, that taking a second look at the process is time well spent. After all, if culture really does eat strategy every day of the week, it’s your people who will be picking the restaurant.