recruiting 101
a not fake guide to recruiting
tldr; this is the highest signal to noise ratio framework of how to think about recruiting on the internet. the basic idea is you should care about three things aaa; attitude, attention (or ability to focus for consecutive 15 minute periods) and abstraction (how many degrees of abstraction they can play around with relative to what you’re hiring for). this is the practical operationalization of cognitive science’s idea of executive functioning and this blog’s toe.
Hey. So the internet is a sea of advice of how to think about recruiting. Knowledge is an if then statement and so if you can’t find most recruiting advice correct then you lack variety in context windows.
Level 1 is buying the grifters course.
Level 2 is not buying the grifters course because you’ve identified the grifter as a grifter.
Level 3 is buying the grifters course and recognizing the grift.
Empathy as intelligence or something.
If we can find truth in everything, what we are saying is that attention is more important than truth. Pair that with my essay the goal of your platform and what we are looking to do is find the fewest concepts to think about your recruiting in a way that solves for accuracy/precision (order) across the largest amount of use cases (variety).
The goal is to cut through the noise and this is really fucking hard because predicting employee performance is really fucking hard. Psychometrics can’t do it. Amazon kinda can.
That does not mean it’s not simple. Many things are hard simple and we love easy complicated. Weight loss = eat less workout which = simple/hard and diet pills / training programs = easy/complicated. Apply that to any category.
So here I go with this recruitment category. Simple to screen for / hard ideas to actually hold onto. Okay, here’s the thesis; (outside of role specifics1) what you care about when hiring is three things above a certain intelligence level2
Call it AAA. Attitude / Attention / Abstraction
First the attitude. The McKinsey equivalent is skill / will. Life is very hard. And the internet is a sea of content that is negative or competitive. It’s not breeding ground for positivity, especially positivity that’s not over capitalized (meaning they aren’t thinking transactionally or interested in short term gains).
there are no successful consumer companies that do not appeal to any of the seven deadly sins. different motivators can apply to different constituents within each company, even different behaviors from the same constituent. examples: sloth: uber, amazon pride: instagram, tik tok gluttony: doordash, netflix lust: tinder, onlyfans envy: pinterest wrath: twitter greed: bitcoin, robinhood.’ — venture capital investor chris paik
Finding someone excited to dive into the work, dive into hard tasks, positive in ambiguous/hard moments and just generally showing up with a pleasant can do attitude is increasingly rare. If someone talks smack on someone else, or talks smack at large this is not a good attitude.
You know good attitudes when you see one. These people often have a lot of energy. This can be operationalized as how communicative are they during the recruitment process. If someone says ‘I have to get back to you on that,’ then what they are saying to some extent internally is ugh hard thought push that down the road (the counterpoint is people who are actually just being deeply thoughtful and want to give something the space-time it needs; this happens but is rare) which is indicative of not a great attitude because a great attitude is can do and can do now. My co-founder at Main Street once said that he thinks about recruiting in terms of ROI. How much energy do I have to put in to get something back. Great attitudes feel productive DURING the interview process. Less great attitudes feel sluggish. 95% of people I have hired do not have this A+ attitude.
Two is attention. Operationalized as the number of consecutive 15 minute periods in a row on average they can lock in and focus. The unit of 15. The internet has fried the brain. I’m not excluded. But you already knew that.
What does fry the brain mean? Degree of information integrated. How long can you actually lock in and concentrate on a task. If I ask you a question that requires thinking for 5 minutes and you say I’ll get back to you it tells me your ability to integrate information. Procrastination is a lack of ability to integrate information in real-time. The question the hiring manager is looking to answer is how many weeks with five days in a row has the person completed multiple blocks of two hours of completely uninterrupted work in one day?
Once more. How many weeks the person has completed multiple two-hour blocks of fully uninterrupted work in a single day, five days in a row. I’d estimate that 99% of your applicants haven’t produced two days in a row.
So again, when you are looking for who to hire what matters is can someone actually lock the fuck in for 15 consecutive minutes over and over again. Because if they can, and they have a great attitude there is absolutely no excuse with modern tools like a ChatGPT that any problem can’t be solved.
A counter argument for this is role specificity. Do you really understand the role and then do you have the clarity to understand what you are screening for. But the extent to which you have leverage on that is a function of how many 15 minute periods you can really lock in for. How many total units of 15 do you have per day at your company? If no one on your team can do that then you have yourself a bozo explosion. Because a bozo isn’t an idiot, a bozo is someone who in the information theory of consciousness language is disintegrated.
This is why McKinsey folks often make better operators then startup people because they are more integrated as per there ability to focus for 15 minute consecutive periods. Where the McKinsey folks struggle is attitude and rather then explaining why I’ll quote yale school of management and harvard business school chris agrylis at large
‘for 15 years, i have been conducting in-depth studies of management consultants. i decided to study consultants for a few simple reasons. first, they are the epitome of the highly educated professionals who play an increasingly central role in all organizations. almost all of the consultants i’ve studied have mbas from the top three or four u.s. business schools. they are also highly committed to their work. for instance, at one company, more than 90% of the consultants responded in a survey that they were “highly satisfied” with their jobs and with the company. i also assumed that such professional consultants would be good at learning. after all, the essence of their job is to teach others how to do things differently. i found, however, that these consultants embodied the learning dilemma. the most enthusiastic about continuous improvement in their own organizations, they were also often the biggest obstacle to its complete success. as long as efforts at learning and change focused on external organizational factors – job redesign, compensation programs, performance reviews, and leadership training – the professionals were enthusiastic. indeed, creating new systems and structures was precisely the kind of challenge that well educated, highly motivated professionals thrived on. and yet the moment the quest for continuous improvement turned to the professionals’ own performance, something went wrong. it wasn’t a matter of bad attitude. the professionals’ commitment to excellence was genuine, and the vision of the company was clear. nevertheless, continuous improvement did not persist. and the longer the continuous improvement efforts continued, the greater the likelihood that they would produce ever-diminishing returns.
what happened? the professionals began to feel embarrassed. they were threatened by the prospect of critically examining their own role in the organization. indeed, because they were so well paid (and generally believed that their employers were supportive and fair), the idea that their performance might not be at its best made them feel guilty. far from being a catalyst for real change, such feelings caused most to react defensively. they projected the blame for any problems away from themselves and onto what they said were unclear goals, insensitive and unfair leaders, and stupid clients. what explains the professionals’ defensiveness? not their attitudes about change or commitment to continuous improvement; they really wanted to work more effectively. rather, the key factor is the way they reasoned about their behavior and that of others.
it is impossible to reason anew in every situation. if we had to think through all the possible responses every time someone asked, “how are you?” the world would pass us by. therefore, everyone develops a theory of action – a set of rules that individuals use to design and implement their own behavior as well as to understand the behavior of others. usually, these theories of actions become so taken for granted that people don’t even realize they are using them.’ — chris argyris yale school of management and harvard business school telling us about the lack of agility with the consultant labor class
Focus and attitude get us 80% of the way there.
The last 20%, the number three is abstraction. The above quote by Argyris tells us that in a certain level of abstraction, consultants have a bad attitude. When consultants don’t make good startup people it’s because they hang out in too high level of abstraction. When startup people aren’t good startup people it’s because they hang out in too low level of abstraction.
When we talk about abstraction, we are asking how many different levels of abstraction can the person play in and how easily and robustly can they move around different levels of abstraction. Does your Product Manager think about the product abstractly, tactically and strategically. Can he articulate the difference and articulate the process he’s doing when articulating this? If your cofounders can’t play with you across abstractions then you may be a solo cofounder. If you lack the temporal control to create space time during sensitive periods of execution then you need abstraction help.
A major limiting step to integrating information is the absence of effective interfaces —individuals who can communicate across knowledge domains. different fields have distinct paradigms, tools, and mental models, making cross-disciplinary communication inherently challenging. for instance:
designers and engineers often struggle to align their perspectives due to mismatched structures.
managers or interdisciplinary thinkers serve as critical interfaces, facilitating communication and reducing misunderstandings.
such translators are rare but invaluable. the incentives for translators are typically always present; the social systems defend against integration. in rare moments, when someone has the social capital and broad variety of experiences, the individual operates across boundaries, facilitating understanding and reducing misunderstandings. they embody ashby’s law of requisite variety by bridging fragmented systems and leading to information integration. 3
If you bring in someone who has great attitude and great ability to lock in and be attentive but can’t properly move across abstractions then this person is not a barrel in Keith Rabois language but ammo. What this looks like is that the person you hire is sending you things like progress against plan, general updates and you’re not even wondering what’s actually going on. If you’re not wondering what’s going on it’s because they have a map and they also swimming the abstraction layer which is the employees relationship with you and so forth. Ability to move across abstractions points to delegation skills.
AAA abstraction attention attitude. the fewest amount of concepts to think about your recruiting in a way that solves for accuracy/precision (order) across the largest amount of use cases (variety).
Its our conceptual challenge and is necessarily your conceptual challenge. We didn’t solve it but we made a big dent.
The theory of everything that I told wrote and told you was a theory of everything (versus a unified physics field equation) is of course how we round out this essay.
The general goal of your organization is to produce life, which is to say that it should not die and that it should be alive (growth, new launches etc)
If your company lacks life it’s because it lacks either variety of awareness or capabilities
Your job as a CEO is to find the fewest rules that produce the most variety and most order aka produce the most life
The fewest rules are basically who you decide to work with, under the assumption that the abstract definition of a rule is information held constant
If we model a company as a data stream or as a learning organism, then the AAA framework is the foundations for an information theoretic recruitment language, which is to say we set the conceptual framework to think about ‘how can we acquire the right information for the cheapest price in the most repeatable manner.’
Said differently when you are recruiting you are buying an information packet. That packet gives you some prediction about future performance.
Six months of work is higher signal than an interview. If a candidate applies and submits five answers to questions than you have cheaper information then if you need an interview to do so. Reference work is better than no reference work.
And so the question is what is the right information packet, what goes in there and how do we produce an information packet that gives us what we need and ideally in a way that’s repeatable. that’s what aaa sets the frame for.
as mentioned there are many recruitment framework. one notable one, The WHO Method, (whose book notes are here) tells us that an A player is the best candidate for the best role. To some extent I agree, but I think this is changing quickly. As AI increases, specialization in the general sense decreases. Basically, what I think you are looking for when making full time hires is general executive functioning skills.
This is a framework for general goal achieving ability that is given to children but applies IMO 1:1 in operating as per our AAA framework. What you are looking for is people who can emotionally regulate or control their own tempo.
If technology is artificial time and the more technology the harder it is to focus, the rare person is the person who can control their own tempo. That results in a good attitude, an ability to give things deep focused attention which typically spills into being able to focus on the right abstraction.
If anyone’s interested, always happy to talk more about recruiting.
to what extent they matter i briefly cover and is past the scope of this essay
look at any billionaire podcast host as evidence of this
For more in depth thinking on this see John Wentworths wonderful interface as the scare resource.