Hiring Secrets: Basecamp
Hire the Work, not the Résumé.
The decisions I feel most proud of are the hiring decisions. The decisions I feel most stressed about are hiring decisions too. The prospect of hiring the wrong person is among my worst nightmares. I’ve been thinking about how to do it well and I am always curious how other people minimize the risks of hiring a bad fit.
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of Basecamp are original thinkers on how to run a successful and sustainable business. Their book “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work” offers plenty of unorthodox ideas, from the absence of goals to original incentive schemes. Little wonder that they have a very unusual stance on hiring. It boils down to the following:
Hire the work, not the résumé.
They start by ditching the résumé.
You can’t land a job at Basecamp based on your résumé. CVs might as well be tossed in the garbage. We don’t really care where you went to school, or how many years you’ve been working in the industry, or even that much about where you just worked. What we care about is who you are and what you can do.
They look for good people.
Someone the rest of the team wants to work with, not just someone they’d tolerate. It does not matter how good you are at the job if you’re an ass. Nothing you can do for us would make up for that.
They look for candidates who are interesting and different from the people they already have.
We don’t need 50 twentysomething clones in hoodies with all of the same culture references. We do better work, broader work, and more considered work when the team reflects the diversity of our customer base. ‘Not exactly what we already have’ is a quality in itself.
Finally, if the candidate has cleared the first two bars, then it’s all about the work. At Basecamp, they put a real project in front of the candidates so that they can show what they can do.
Résumés aren’t work… we all know that they are exaggerated and often bullshit. Beyond that - even if the résumé is perfectly accurate, a list of work if not the work itself. Don’t just take their word for it. Take their work for it.
… What we don’t do are riddles, blackboard problem solving, or fake “come up with the answer on the spot” scenarios. We don’t answer riddles all day, we do real work. So we give people real work to do and the appropriate time to do it. It’s the same kind of work they’d be doing if they get the job.
… by focusing on the person and their work, we can avoid hiring an imaginary person.
Such an approach ends up giving a chance to unorthodox candidates who would have been cut out during a standard hiring process.
There is no GPA filter to cut out someone who didn’t care for certain parts of their schooling. There’s no pedigree screen to prevent the self-taught from getting hired. There is no arbitrary “years of experience” cut to prevent a fast learner from applying to a senior position.
Great people who are eager to do great work come from the most unlikely places and look nothing like what you might imagine. Focusing just on one person and their work is the only way to spot them.
A takeaway for a job search: find out how diverse the current team is. Think about what value you are able to add in terms of diversity - by this I mean first and foremost the diversity of thought.