How to Use Auditions in Hiring Technical Talent
Without a doubt the topic I get asked most about is hiring and managing technical talent. Whether it’s your technical co-founder, a key early hire, or a contractor, a key part of your process should be a test project.
In the next few articles, we’re going to cover how to properly run a test project, also called an audition (HT to Matt Mullenweg of Automattic), with a prospective technical hire to assess the fit with your team. Auditions have been used in many other professions to great success, but for some reason they’re just now becoming a part of mainstream hiring in technology companies.
I’ve been running auditions in one form or another for about 10 years, and there’s nothing that’s proven more reliable in making solid hiring decisions.
What are the Goals of an Audition?
In an audition, you’re looking to evaluate the following:
- Is this person technically competent?
- Can you and the rest of your team work with this person?
- Can this person grow as the company grows?
Each of these topics is loaded with detours and landmines. I’ve seen more time and money wasted on bad hires than anything else, so we’re going to go deep on each of these topics. We’ll cover how to set up for success, what to look for, and who else you might need to have around you to help in the process.
What are the Guidelines of an Audition?
As you get better at running auditions, you’ll come up with your own process. For now, here are some guiding principles to help you create successful auditions.
It should be directly related to your business
This may seem obvious, but if you read lots of articles on how to interview, you’ll run into things that companies like Google does where they ask someone to solve how many ping pong balls it takes to fill up Manhattan. That may make for interesting conversation, but it doesn’t show if the candidate understands your business domain at all.
Pick a problem you’re actively trying to solve because you’ll care more about the outcome. And, if you’re investing your time, you have to make all of it count. Why working on something esoteric when you’ve got real dragons to slay?
It should be about 4-8 hours worth of work
There are different schools of thought on this, but I like creating a project that takes about a day. You can solve real problems in a day’s worth of work, and you can get a sense of ability to focus and deliver under tight time constraints. I’ve found that a couple hours isn’t enough time to really dig in with someone.
In case it’s not obvious, this means that you should plan on paying the candidate for their time. At the very least you’ll need to offer to pay. Many times, developers won’t mind investing this much time if they really want the job, but you can’t ask someone to work for free.
It should test the ability to both design and implement
Early technical hires have to be able to do it all. They have to be able to brainstorm with you on possible new product ideas, understand the customer and market, and then go away and build the actual solution. Your audition should, in small form, cover all of these areas.
It should test the ability to work like your company works
This topic in particular often gets overlooked. If your company is all in one office, but this candidate is going to be remote, you have to test them working as they will work with you day in and day out. If you work primarily via chat apps like Slack, run the test project in Slack. It doesn’t matter if the candidate is a rock star in every area if they can’t work like you work. It will be a disaster.
Just Remember
- Never. Ever. Ever hire a developer without an audition
- Make auditions as close to real life as possible using the basic guidelines in this article
- Auditions are as much about assessing personality fit as technical competency
Your Assignment
Buy the book The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work by Scott Berkun. The entire book is worth reading, but if you’ve got limited time focus on the sections around how Automattic hires. It’s fantastic.
In our next article, we’ll cover the topic of testing for technical competency in depth. I’ll include real-life case studies that you won’t want to miss.