Watch a candidate do a small piece of the actual work before you make an offer.
Why is it harder to verify skills now than it used to be?
Because every signal a hiring manager relies on has become cheap to produce.
Resumes are written with AI. Cover letters are generated in seconds. Application volume has climbed to the point where reading everything is impossible, so companies filter with software that candidates work around using more software.
Interview answers get rehearsed against the same tools. A candidate can arrive with polished responses to every common question in a field they have never worked in.
None of that makes candidates dishonest. Most are not. It means the evidence you were using to sort them no longer sorts them, and the volume makes it harder to notice.
What does a bad hire cost a small company?
Far more than the salary.
A company with forty people has no bench. The work assigned to a person who cannot do it does not get redistributed quietly. It stops, or it lands on somebody already at capacity.
The delay in finding out costs as much. Nobody discovers a bad hire in week one. They discover it in month three, after the person has produced work that other work now depends on.
A third cost never gets budgeted. Somebody has to review what was built, decide what is salvageable, and rebuild the rest. That is often longer than doing it from nothing.
How did an interview miss something that obvious?
Early in my time at a consulting firm, we were building a set of disk utilities as a product. One piece was a directory program.
The version shipping with the operating system was painfully slow. Our bet was that rewriting it in a lower-level language would make it much faster. That bet was correct. The technical judgment was sound.
I needed somebody who knew that language. I posted the role, read the resumes, and interviewed.
The person I hired said on their resume that they knew the language inside and out. They interviewed well. Confident, articulate, easy to talk to.
I was a baby manager at the time. I had the title of vice president of consulting and no training in interviewing whatsoever. Nobody had ever taught me how to run one, and I had never thought to ask.
So I hired on a resume and a good impression, which is exactly what I had been given to work with and exactly what I should not have relied on.
What is the first sign a hire is not working out?
In this case, the program was slower than the one we were replacing.
Not slightly slower. Far slower than the version that shipped with the operating system, which was the thing we had set out to beat.
I investigated. I read the code, and the code was awful. Not stylistically awful, structurally awful, in ways that told me the person writing it did not understand the language.
So I sat down with them and asked hard questions. After a while they admitted they had never programmed in that language in their life. Never written a line of it. Their background was somewhere else entirely.
I let them go, and the project finished without them.
How do you test a candidate without wasting their time?
Keep it short, keep it real, and pay for it.
A small piece of actual work, an hour or two, from your real problem domain. Not a puzzle, not a whiteboard exercise, not an algorithm nobody uses. Something resembling what the job involves on a normal Tuesday.
Then, and this is the part that carries the information, have them explain what they did. Why this approach. What they would change with another day. Where they were unsure.
Someone who did the work can answer those questions for as long as you keep asking. Someone who did not will run out quickly, and you will not need to be clever to notice.
Pay them for the time. It costs a few hundred dollars against a mistake that costs months, and candidates who are worth hiring will decline unpaid work from strangers.
What did the interview in the apartment prove?
I already knew all of this, which is the part that stings.
My own first real job came from an interview in Rick Shirley’s apartment, where he sat me down and had me write programs on the spot. He did not ask what I knew. He watched me do it.
That is how I got hired with almost no experience and a background nobody would have shortlisted. The demonstration was the whole application.
Then I became a manager and hired somebody off a resume and a good conversation. I had experienced the right method personally, and I still defaulted to the easy one, because the easy one is what everybody does and nobody had told me otherwise.
Trust but verify. I learned that phrase the expensive way.
What happens when the project cannot be saved?
We never made that directory program fast.
The bet on the language was right. The code we had was not salvageable, the schedule had already absorbed the loss, and what we ended up with was tolerable rather than good. It shipped in that condition.
Not every story ends with a recovery. Some of them end with a system that works well enough and a lesson that cost more than the system was worth.
I have hired a great many people since, and I have never again taken somebody’s word for what they could do.
The Guides That Get Your Book Written, Published, and Sold
Four short, practical guides on writing, publishing, and selling your book, plus the occasional note when there's something worth your time. No fluff, no daily inbox clutter. Drop your email and they're yours.
We use MailerLite to manage our list and send these emails. Your address is used only to send you what you signed up for. We will not sell it, share it, or use it for anything else, and you can unsubscribe anytime.