Episode 114

Jared Teslow on Balancing Pressure and Comfort: Enhancing Interview Techniques for Optimal Candidate Assessment

TIM: We are live on the Objective Hiring Show today. We're joined by Jared. Jared, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us.

JARED: Thank you for having me.

TIM: It is absolutely our pleasure. I'm pumped to speak to you today. And I think what would be a nice place to start is to hear just a little bit about yourself, who we are speaking to today.

JARED: Sure. My name is Jared Teslow. I'm currently the chief data and analytics officer at Pendrick Capital Partners. We are a debt purchaser, and we're a debt purchaser headquartered in the Dallas area. And we generally We generally buy medical debt and collect on medical debt. We use a lot of analytics throughout our organization. We consider ourselves to be a fairly data-centric, fairly data-forward organization. I've been with Pendrick for just under two years. I started in March of 2023. So just this close to my two-year mark, it's coming up rapidly. And yeah, before that I was with Capital One. And had a very data-centric career. I was a data science manager for Capital One for a great many years. Yeah, that's a bit about me.

TIM: That's great to get that intro. And I'm sure a big part of your career has been hiring and hiring really good people. And obviously a key element of that is interviewing still today. Maybe it won't be in five or 10 years. We will see, but still, interviews are essential in finding and selecting the right person. So I'd love to dive into interviews, starting with thinking about just the environment of the interview, because I feel like there's always this sense of both sides almost being on guard a little bit and not necessarily giving you the full truth, the interviewer, the interviewee. Do you try to make the candidate feel comfortable and relax into it? Or do you like a bit of pressure and see how they react to that? How do you view setting up that interview environment?

JARED: That's a good point. Generally. I view the point of an interview as getting an idea of how you think about problems. And I find when you put people under a lot of pressure, I don't know that they necessarily think clearly under those circumstances. I'm sure there are definitely roles for which putting people under a lot of pressure is a great move, but I think for hiring analysts, coders, and data engineers, I'd rather understand how you approach problems, how you think about them, because that's going to be what's going to give me the best idea. If you're relaxed and you're calm and I ask you to relate to me about how you think about working with a computer language that you say that you're very familiar with, and you're getting things wrong, then I can feel very confident. That it has little to do with the interview, for example. When they're really stressed, sometimes people just get things wrong. And you say, so in a SQL query, what's the difference between a union or a union all? It might be something that they normally could answer, but they can't answer in this moment. Yeah, so I like to try to keep things relaxed. I like to try to get people in areas that they're comfortable in. I try to ask a handful of questions that I'm fairly confident about based on their background. They'll be able to answer easily before I move into questions that are a little more about trying to loosen them up. So they're going to be able to give me the read I need, which is how are you going to actually approach. Your coding tasks: How are you going to approach business problems? When you work on a business problem, how do you know? When you work on a particular business problem, I give you a prompt of some form, and I ask you, what are you going to be? What are you going to be thinking about first? How are you going to structure the problem? You need to be in a relaxed state to really let your mind have sufficient creativity to really. To really wrap your brain around it in a useful way

TIM: Yeah, I can remember earlier on in my career going for jobs, particularly in investment banking and consulting, and they loved making you feel uncomfortable because there was an idea that you were going to have to be in front of a client, you had to think on your feet, and you were going to have to suddenly start doing these mental math problems. They loved, What's 87 multiplied by 94? I have no idea. But I could probably do that 15 years ago. But yeah, that would not be a great way to interview the typical analyst or data scientist who probably isn't really exposed to that type of stuff in their day-to-day work.

JARED: Right. Yeah, it'd be a different matter again. Every time you need to pick whatever questions you're asking, you really should be very thoughtful about how the answers to those questions would be useful in relating to what it is they will be doing, what it is you will be having them do. Does it actually tease out the quality candidates from the not-quality candidates, right?

TIM: Yeah, exactly. If it's not that correlation, then what's the point? It's just a conversation. Then you're not really learning, not gathering any data about the candidate that's going to help you make an informed decision.

JARED: Mean

TIM: if you think about some of the better and less strong interviewers that you've encountered. What would separate those? Or even if you think back to, I don't know, maybe the first time interviewers, where you're like, Oh, wow, this person's never done this before, versus the veterans. How do you think about the differences there?

JARED: So it's tricky, right? Because oftentimes people that are earlier in their careers are more likely to be going through large amounts of interviews. Whereas people that are later in their careers While there'd be, they're going to be more likely to be very experienced in whatever technical aspect I'm interested in; there may be very. inexperienced when it comes to interviewing. Interviewing itself is a skill. And anybody that's going to school, one of the things that most schools' career centers are going to do is conduct mock interviews. And I just think they have a very different attitude than the people who regularly interview to develop that interviewing skill. And so I try to approach interviewing Wherever it is I'm looking for, that's one of the reasons I try to get a relaxed atmosphere. Because that's an equalizing playing field. Because the things I'm looking for generally are fairly specific. And in that situation, I'm going to have different specific things I'm looking for in more junior candidates and different specific things I'm looking for in more senior candidates. But I don't want the amount; the fact is, one junior candidate, this is their very first interview, and another junior candidate, they've had 300 interviews so far. I don't want your—I, my goal, as an interviewer, is to have that not matter, which is why, like I said, I try to open with questions that are straightforward, that are really down-to-earth; whatever business cases I structure or put together, I try to include something that, given very little background in the problem, you're going to be able to say something meaningful and useful in it. And on those occasions. I'm not necessarily scoring points heavily on that. Sometimes someone can have a slightly better answer on those opening questions and a slightly worse answer, but I'm mostly relaxing you to the point where you will be able to work on the next on the later elements of the problem where you're really able to tease things out. Like, for example, if I'm talking about, you know, a business case where we're talking about, I don't know, selling shrimp, selling shrimp, we're a shrimp wholesaler, we're selling shrimp to restaurants along the coast. What sort of things would you what sort of things would you think would affect and impact my ability to sell to a particular restaurant at a particular price point? Very open-ended, with no firm and hard answer to these questions, and it gives the answer for somebody to start thinking of things and start brainstorming, and that gets them in, I think, a good creative space. And almost without regard to what they say, I agree with them because I'm interested in getting them into that space, right? It's possible they say something that'll get them down a rabbit hole that's very unhelpful, but usually whatever you say is going to be something that's good, and you should continue. And when you're in that brainstorming space, you want to affirm everything that they're saying so that they can continue to be interested in creative. And so they might bring up, Hey, the proximity to a port, right? Because I've got shrimp, I'm going to have to bring them to them somehow. So transportation is going to be really important. And then you say, Oh, so I also need to worry about the truck, and the distance it is from the port is going to depend on the truck. And if I work out of a handful of ports, is that going to be less expensive or more expensive? And they're just wrong. continues on. I made this up, by the way. I've never done that particular example. But once again, this is how you get people, in my opinion, in a relaxed environment. And if I'm asking these sorts of questions and they're getting really uncomfortable, I then will sometimes ask them another question that's even maybe easier per se. Or I'll tweak up the following question, because the whole point of those initial elements is to get them in a headspace where I can ask them questions that have to do with math, questions that have to do with structuring a word problem type answer, constructing an actual how do you approach, so now that we've decided that We're going to be working out of the port of New Orleans because it's close proximity to all of these different areas that shrimp are very prevalent, right? It's not too far from Houston. It's really close to Baton Rouge and Jacksonville; it's a two and a half hour drive from any of those, and we can then start working through. Okay, so we now have a fleet of buses, sorry, trucks, and we're going to be calculating. They cost us this much to do this particular distance through Mac; maybe we're having Mac do the truck service for us. Or a dozen different possible answers, but the point is you might ask another open-ended question if they aren't sufficiently relaxed. If after two open-ended questions I'm still not getting anything, I will sometimes like bail on whatever my stated case was and ask a series of very easy questions, purely with this, with the ability to give them as much confidence as they can with the experience. But I'm obviously not going to be able to get a very useful read out of that if they can't get into that more relaxed environment. And if I ask them other things, they're going to start shutting down, and then they don't have a good experience. I've more or less already decided at that point. And I want to make sure that they walk away, that they walk away confident so that they can go on and wind up someplace where at the end of the day, this is always a goal, right? We're both interviewing each other, and they might decide they don't like the way I approach things, and that's fine too, right? And we're just, we're trying to find the right matchups, and the sooner that we can identify that and they can move on to a role that they're more likely to get, the better off it is for them. But again, I want to give them confidence. I want them to walk away from the interview feeling like that went pretty well so that they can be confident for the next interview they go in, that they can be confident that that interview can go pretty well. That's my goal.

TIM: That's a great way of articulating it, and I haven't heard it explained that way before. Where I've heard people describe helping the candidate to relax and get into it was almost like a slightly different lens I wanted to run by you. And it was more like they wanted to understand the true person and have their true color come out and have that guard go down. So they go, Oh, I understand who you actually are, whereas your views slightly relax into it. So I can, so they can be creative and can actually solve the problems. What about that kind of personality side as well?

JARED: So in my opinion, sometimes I'll do behavioral interviews, and in behavioral interviews, that would be my goal for building rapport with the individual. They're just two slightly different interviews, and you get different reads on them. It's actually why I think behavioral interviews are really important. The downside to behavioral is if you've never been exposed to them before, right? You're not familiar with the situation, tactic, task, action, result, or format for an answer. They can be blindsided for some people. Whereas I feel like a business case, whether you've seen them before or not, I feel like you've had word problems in the history of your life. But yeah, when I do behaviorals, my goal for getting them to relax is to get an idea of how they think about the world. I just don't know that it, generally, these interviews are like an hour long. And I don't know; I can't do everything in that hour, so I have to pick and choose. If you want to get a good behavioral read, you can't do it during a business case, is my opinion. Maybe I'll get an idea of what you want at the end of every interview. I try to save I try to save five to ten minutes at the end for them to ask me a question. I try to save five to ten minutes for me to let them know about maybe something. Something that I'm interested in independent of work Sometimes I'll do that at the beginning; sometimes I'll do that at the end. It just depends. More junior candidates, it can be a good icebreaker. More senior candidates, it could be a mechanism to just let them get to know me a little better. And it lets them segue into, hey, whatever questions you ask, you can ask a wide variety of different questions. It doesn't have to be necessarily about the work or the job. It could be about whatever you're interested in. And of course, everybody always tells you to come in with at least one question. I think you should come in with two or three questions. You should have a question about the business to the best of your ability. You should have a question, at least one question about the job you're looking at, but you should also have a question for the person you're interviewing. You should have a question about, like, how do they approach managing a work-life balance? How do they approach How do they approach tackling the difficulties of their role? What excites them about their role? There's just so many good, easy questions that you should always have a question that's personal, and then you could just pull out whichever ones of these questions you think make the most sense based on the tenor of the rest of the interview.

TIM: That's a great shout. And I think it's low-hanging bitter fruit for candidates because surely if you were to sit there as a candidate and think there must be a lot of things you really would like to know before you started the job. In fact, you would probably find yourself with 20 or 30 questions. And so just think about what you're actually interested in. Maybe make it slightly appropriate for the stage of the hiring process as well. And as you Say how the interview has gone, but surely. If you were to meditate on that, there must be a ton of things that you really do need to know before you sign a contract and go and spend the next two, three, four, or five years of your life with these people. Every day, yes.

JARED: asking what their philosophy is on management style or asking what their philosophy is on how they think about giving out, how they approach ratings at the company. These are very practical questions that, as a candidate, you're probably not going to be able to acquire any way except by asking people.

TIM: You mentioned before, part of the goal is, okay, so make the candidate comfortable, give them a good experience, even if they don't end up getting the job, at least they've. Got a good experience. They feel reasonable about themselves. They've gotten some feedback, etc. What if the candidate is absolutely tanking, like they're bombing in the interview and even within 10 minutes? Whoa, this is going to be a long 60 minutes. Are you of the view that you're doing the candidate a service or disservice by extending that and seeing it through and being polite to them, or at some point you go, you know what, like this is not helping either of us?

JARED: So I generally have a policy of I generally have a policy of So I like my interviews to be 45 minutes, but I block the full hour, and I'll oftentimes ask them if I need them to extend past the 45 minutes. So I always have the full hour blocked on my calendar. With the expectation that if a candidate's really good, we can get that cleared out in 45 minutes. If a candidate's really bad, we can get that cleared out in 45 minutes. And if you're a little more on the middling side, or if there's something really interesting I want to talk to you about, we can talk those extra 15 minutes. But it is, in fact, when you couple that, so again, I like mine to be 45 minutes with the possibility of extending to an hour. And I like to explain who I am, I like to ask them who they are, and then I like to explain the role. That's going to take 15 minutes. I've never seen a candidate bomb so hard that we couldn't get through 20 minutes. Because, as I said, I like 10 minutes to ask something, to bring up something relaxed about myself maybe later on. Give them a little bit more time to ask questions. I've never seen a candidate bomb quite that hard. Except in person. I've had people bomb that hard, but i've never over zoom had anybody bombed that hard how I would approach it is I would probably ask increasingly open ended questions, I might shift the can shifted over to more of a less of a business case more of a Behavioral style interview where I'd ask questions that again, there's no wrong answer to tell me at about a time that you've had to deal with something stressful in your work environment and how you approach that right once again, it's very difficult to It's very difficult to not wind up in a situation where you can get 20 minutes where you have an open ended question and you're able to transition into a behavioral, if you absolutely need to. Some people say then I can't compare two candidates; any candidate that I'm doing this for, I've got a pretty solid idea of what their rating is.

TIM: And it's not a two thumbs up. Is that what you're saying?

JARED: It's that they will do much better off in a different organization, and that's great for them. And it's great for me that we both identified that now rather than after they quit their current job. They came over. Maybe they moved. They've upended their family. There are some terrible outcomes. Hiring the wrong person is obviously bad for us from the employer's standpoint, but it's terrible for the employee.

TIM: You mentioned in passing that you hadn't seen someone bomb online quickly, but in person it can happen. Is that because there's just extra nerves or there's some really weird social anxiety going on or

JARED: I do think there's an element of, there's an element of so in person. You're always in an environment that you're not familiar with. In a Zoom call, nine times out of ten, you're in an environment that you chose most of the time. Wherever you're doing it from, you're in an environment you chose. So there's an element of comfort there, right? Right now we're in my home office. I'm in my home office; you're in your home office. We're both able to be very, very relaxed as a result of that, right? But in person, you're in these interview rooms, and sometimes they schedule a candidate to have two or three or four interviews all in the same day, and they tend to leave the candidates in the same little white box that has some very unoffensive artwork on the wall, a tiny table in there, and it's got the overall vibe and all the ones I've ever been in. It is very much, very clinical. And I'll tell you one place people aren't really particularly comfortable. It's at the doctor's office, right? I don't know. I, but again, I've had people break down and start to cry in an interview.

TIM: When they've realized they're not doing so well.

JARED: Yeah. Because like in person, it's in person, they'll, you'll typically have artifacts, right? You'll have art, I'll have artifacts I bring in, and I might have an eight- or 10-page case. Now what they don't know is my eight- or 10-page case. No one sees all eight or ten pages. Or maybe they do, and everybody sees all of them. Depending on how the case is structured, right? But they might make assumptions about what's going on here since they were only forced to look at four of the pages, and we're almost at time. And it can be very stressful when you recognize full well that there's a non-trivial amount of this problem you definitely did not get to. And sometimes the interviews can run over, and they can cascade into one another, and the person can wind up being forced to come close to skipping lunch. Just, people need to be very thoughtful about in-person interviewing, because it can be a very difficult experience for the candidates.

TIM: One thing we used to do. This was a while ago now in a bid to lighten the mood, relax the atmosphere, and almost disarm the candidate in a way. Was to take it out of the office. So not talking about online. Now I'm talking about in person, but in a cafe or in a pub, used to be called the pub test in Australia. You go and have a beer with someone and see if you get along with them. Maybe the old-school way of doing it. But have you ever tried to take it out into a slightly more relaxed environment and otherwise have the same type of interview?

JARED: Interesting. I haven't ever done that for interviewing. I haven't ever done that for interviewing. Capital One, that simply wouldn't have been, wouldn't have been allowed. I did do a little bit of recruitment effort, right? So I distinguish, so I distinguish recruitment is when you identify a candidate and then, you're interested in reaching out to them directly and telling, informing them about the company and encouraging them to apply. That's a separate thing from the interview process. And on those occasions I'll take someone out to, especially if they're local; I'll take them out to a restaurant that I'm familiar with in town. And I'll typically do it on my own dime, but I know that a lot of companies, they'll have budgets for this sort of thing, and that's fine too. But I just like to, in a relaxed environment where there's no pressure, just get a chance to chat with them about the role or how I'm thinking about the role and why they'd be a, I think, a good candidate. You can get a feel for whether or not you're misaligned in terms of the compensation they need and the compensation you're offering.

TIM: So you'd use it as a kind of presales tool rather than as part of the formal hiring purposes.

JARED: Yeah. Yeah. Although to be fair, any interview should also include plenty of selling, as I said. You're selling this role and this company to the individual. They're selling their work product to your company. So, like, that sales aspect should be going both directions.

TIM: And I think it's particularly easy to lose sight of that when, as we go through different, macroeconomic conditions. Currently, we're in an employer-driven market where there's seemingly an excess of candidates. And so I feel like it's very easy to forget that there's still a two-way process, even if currently employers have the balance of power.

JARED: Yeah, they definitely do this in this current market for a variety of complicated reasons. But those things ebb and flow. They'll come around to it being a candidate's market in the not-too-distant future. So whatever strategy you're employing, you should make sure that it's going to be successful both when the ball's in your court and when the ball's in the candidate's court.

TIM: It sounds like your interview process is really with these case studies in particular, trying to get to the heart of how the candidate thinks about problem-solving, which is pretty much impossible to determine from just a resume. And probably quite hard from a behavioral interview as well. You really have to give them a problem to see how they solve it.

JARED: That's right. That's 100 percent right. And moreover, given the fact that I'm generally looking for analyst or data scientist roles, you can always, for a data scientist, give them a project to work on some coding elements, and then you can have them present their findings to you. That's another great interview form as well. You do need to be careful about how much time those things can take because you can discourage a lot of candidates if you're giving them something that's going to take six or seven hours. But, as long as you're doing your best to be reasonable about it and then they can present it, that's another good way for data scientists or something like that. But if what I'm interested in is how you approach problems and problem-solving, asking you a question in the moment so that you can like sketch out your thoughts to me. And I always tell everybody, you need your pad of paper, you need your pad of paper, you need your pen, and you just get them out and start writing them, and I might even be like, hey, can you bend down your screen so I can see what you're writing just so I can get a feel for exactly how they're going through the steps, and it also can let me catch a spot where, oh, hey, you multiplied that when you should have divided it, or you used a two there, but that really should have been a three based on what you said earlier, right?

TIM: Yeah. One thing about the take-home assessment or take-home test It is, yes, a bit of an imposition sometimes on candidates, especially if it ends up being a lot of work; some candidates sometimes have the perception that it's, oh, this is like free labor. This is free consulting. If, especially if you set it up as a closely related task using your actual business data, I've noticed some candidates are sometimes a little bit. Oh, what are you asking me here? Because at some point in the past, they've been burnt by something like that.

JARED: To some degree, I think we all have, so when I do those, I generally will take real data, I'll mock it up, and I'll change the nature of the business problem to make it clear that it's not my business. So I might give you data that corresponds to that, actually, my debt here, but I could change it over to a credit card. I'm not a credit card company. And you know the nature of the problem is going to change a little bit, and I'll dummy some stuff up so that we can take a look at credit cards or personal loans or things like that because I do know that people are very sensitive to that. I'll also tell you that based on the amount of work it is comparing candidates, that's not a useful tool in my opinion. Like, to actually do that, to actually try to get work out of them, is very difficult. Because I, it's very difficult for me to compare two candidates that receive two different rubrics, right? Because if I give you, if I give candidate a problem and I have candidate B. A different or the same problem that I don't know the answer to? I'm not going to get anything useful out of that, right? I'm not going to be asking the right questions. How do I decide whether candidate A's is better or candidate B's is better? Maybe B's just better at putting together a presentation.

TIM: I feel like the biggest upside of your take-home kind of project, especially if it ends with them presenting it back to you, where you can really dig into the details, is at least you've seen some output, some actual work that they've done, which even in a case study interview, because they're talking through things, is not quite the same as actually writing some code, building a product, shipping something. So is there some loss with not doing a take home project? Is it like a slightly higher risk?

JARED: So it depends on what role I'm hiring for. If I'm hiring for a role that has a non-trivial amount of actual coding, that coding is not something that they're going to be running generally pre-done scripts or something. If they're going to need to be generating stuff, I do like to have something that'll let me assess their ability to code. And for that, you can always create a toy problem. There are a million different toy problems that are already out there. Those aren't great choices because candidates can look them up. But you can create them, look at them, and take a look at them. You can create your own based on them, right? I'm not saying build a program to calculate the number of ping pong balls you can fit in a 747. But there are useful things that you can do, like you can have them put together an amortization schedule in Python, right? There are tons of resources on how to go about doing that. Nobody's bothered actually coding that up in Python because there are so many good resources for it elsewhere. And you've got a simple problem that they can take a look at. They can compare it to Excel's great implementation of that; you could have them code up something in Python in order to calculate the internal rate of return, right? Just practical things that are, like, useful-ish that would give you a feel for how well they can code. If you're looking for how well they can model, you're going to need to give them a data set. In which case, you're going to need to say, Okay, so this is your data set. You can pick an existing data set if you want, right? So you've got the Boston demographics data that's available. There's tons of census stuff that you can pluck out if you don't feel like using your own internal stuff. Pick a target, tie that loosely to a business problem, and let them build you a predictive model that's estimating that. Or if you're interested in seeing how they do on a large language model. You can have them get the corpus of the complete works of William Shakespeare, and when I start a line, have them predict what the next portion of the line will be. And we can do that live in the interview, right? There's a bunch of different ways you can creatively approach ways of getting at this problem, depending on what you're looking to do, right? But you need to be. interview in the same sort of creative way that you approach your job, right? Because hiring people and hiring the best talent are like your primary jobs, right? For most of us, it's the only way. That you can increase your leverage, right? I can only get so much better at coding. ChatGPT can only help me so much because I've got to review whatever code ChatGPT produces. The only way I'm actually going to get more leverage is to hire someone who can do my work at a level I find acceptable. That's the only way that I can, if I don't find it acceptable; I'm going to be spending all my time fixing their work. And that's fine while I'm training them. But if they never get to the point past that. Then this was a terrible hire. I

TIM: Speaking of terrible hires, I've got my fair share over the years. I can tell you that the first two hires I ever made quit within a week. So that can't, you can't get off to a worse start than that in your hiring record. I would say

JARED: Must get three. Yeah.

TIM: In my defense, I don't think I was the primary cause of them quitting. I invited them into what I'd call an Excel hell environment that was ridiculously tedious manual garbage, which they immediately noticed and thought, No, thank you. And my mistake was overselling the job, not being honest enough about the kind of grunt work that we'd have to bash through in the first three to six months. And we pitched it as this fancy thing. And it wasn't, which was. A mistake I learned.

JARED: So when I mentioned that I sell them on the role, you have to sell them on the actual role, the role they're going to be working on, right? You can't sell them on the direction you want to take the role. You can always tell them where the role is. You can tell them where you want to take the role. But be very crisp about the delta between those two, right? The role is here; as you become more experienced, we'll be able to open up time for you to do X, Y, and Z. But until then, you've got you've got to live with the, you've got to live with the role. You've got to sell the role on what it is. Because otherwise they'll come in, they'll see that it's a large gap between what you were promised, and they'll leave. And now, you better hope that your second choice hasn't picked a different job.

TIM: Exactly. And in our example, that was restarting the whole process again, because people have noticed periods, so the second or third choice from two months ago, they've moved on with their lives.

JARED: That's right.

TIM: And so yeah, it was a harsh but useful lesson that I learned to not overpitch things. I personally feel like hiring would be a lot more effective if both parties were as brutally honest with each other as early as possible in the process. Do you agree with that?

JARED: I think there's some truth to that. I don't know that you necessarily need to be brutally honest. To be clear, we should be both brutally honest about the good points and brutally honest about the bad points. I feel like a lot of people, when they hear brutally honest, they think that it's only an obligation to share the things that are bad, which is not true, like you need to be brutally honest in both sections, right? Don't sugarcoat the bad, but don't sugarcoat the good either. Or whatever, don't undersell the good; to the extent there are positives, you need to be crystal clear about what those positives are. Because again, this is the environment they're going in, and it's like one of my big annoyances is when people don't share their salary range. Like you have some idea of what you're going to pay for it, for this role, not sharing the salary is only going to wind up running the risk, in my opinion, of you hiring someone at a wildly different rate than someone else that's already got that job inside your company. And they will find out; people share their salaries. And when they find out whether candidate A or candidate B, the one that's already here, if this person's getting paid a whole lot more, you're going to be answering the question to that employee why the new guy is paid more or why the old guy is paid more. You're always going to be answering that question. And if you don't have a really good answer for it, it's going to create an enormous amount of dissatisfaction, and to be fair, any disparity is always going to result in some amount of dissatisfaction, but sometimes there's good reasons, right? Hiring somebody straight out of school, and they get two years of experience, and so they know the job, and I might bring on a PhD to the team. There's going to be a disparity in pay there. But once again, it's all just assumed they're going to ask you the question of why the pay difference is there. And the answer that you weren't a very good negotiator is never going to sit well with people.

TIM: It's one of those things in hiring where it's tempting to take the easy route out, which seems to be solving the immediate problem, but it's going to create a much bigger problem later on. Like, when I oversold our job, it solved my problem; I put a bum on a seat, but then my life was a nightmare one month later when they quit on day two, and I was left holding the can, doing the work I wanted them to do, and then hiring someone else. It's so dumb. It's such a short-term way of thinking. And I know this is quite common, I think. For some people who maybe have just changed locations, they don't understand the market level in that area. They come in asking for, I don't know, 70 percent of what was actually budgeted. And then some companies might almost take advantage of that. But that's such a short run view because

JARED: They're taking advantage of that. They think they're taking advantage of that.

TIM: but it doesn't

JARED: I'm a firm believer. I'm a firm believer that you don't always get what you pay for, but you always pay for what you get.

TIM: So they'll get their comeuppance when the candidate realizes this three months later. It's, Oh, you've exploited me and my good nature, or what have you. You should have told me. And now I can just get another job elsewhere. Yep. Right? If you think back on your career, I'm sure you haven't always gotten it in your hiring selections. Do any, of course, without naming any names or revealing any personal details, do any particular errors spring to mind? And if so, did you learn anything from those?

JARED: So again, it's very helpful that Capital One has a very robust process. I think if anything, it's got the false negative problem more than the false positive problem. So it's a very tight sieve. And so at Capital One, I definitely didn't have any mishires. I have, since I left Capital One, had a mishire or two where I did feel like the candidate didn't quite understand what the role was going to be like. And once I started walking them through the individual ones, I had that happen. And then they said, I don't know that I can do this. And I said, I'm pretty sure we can get you trained; we can get you in the right spot. And ultimately they decided that wasn't, they didn't want to be jumping through. those levels of hoops. And so they tendered their resignation. And I can again, I've got no fault on them. I thought I was clear in the interview. But when I went to the next interviews, I was more crystal clear about what the expectations were. So I used that failing, and that was definitely my failing. That's definitely my family. If a candidate is leaving within three months, that's a hiring fail, regardless of whether you're the one that wants to get rid of them or they want to separate, right? That's a— that is, you failed to point something critical out. And I went through, and I said, okay, so how can I be a little more clear for the next series of people that I interview, since I'm going to be filling this role? So I guess it's very similar to probably how you looked at things when you went in there. In my instance, I was a lot clearer about the nature of the problems. And then I also added a little touchstone at the end of the interview, letting them know that the sort of things they did in this problem are going to be very comparable, although not identical, to what they'd be doing in the work. So if this makes you feel really uncomfortable, this might not be the right role for you.

TIM: You mentioned passing a moment ago that a Capital One, at least it wasn't really a false positive problem. Like, by the time you'd hired the person, they jumped through enough hoops. You'd analyze them enough. You were pretty confident. They were good. It was more of a false negative problem. That is what missing out on some great candidates. Potentially it is that are maybe just, stage or anywhere else.

JARED: Maybe they had a bad day. The system that Capital One has is willing to accept false negatives to reduce the false positives, right? You're always choosing; you're always choosing because if you think about it, the penalty for a bad hire is so much higher than the penalty for not getting a quality candidate. Now, again, it's great to get the absolute best possible candidates, but there are a lot of great candidates out there. And if you're seeing something like 400 people in a role, and I don't get the number one best person, I get the number four or five; I'm still doing pretty well. That's an outstanding candidate. So as long as your process is. In general, not weeding people out needlessly. And definitely you don't want them weeding them out for bad reasons. You don't want to weed out all of the people that are left-handed, for example, or things that similarly a person cannot control.

TIM: I've got an interesting anecdote here. Someone in our team used to run a large engineering function, and he just joined this business, and the HR team was posting the job ads for some software engineers. He was hiring, and their expectation was that they do the first few layers of screening and filtering of the resume and the first kind of phone screen, which is fairly typical. He was a little bit dubious because he was thinking, How are you going to really effectively screen and evaluate software engineers? Like, that's, to be fair, not your job or skill set. And they said no, we don't want you to have to waste your time. We don't want you to have to speak to the weirdos and the freaks. He's what? What are you talking about? This is software engineers. They're the best ones. Don't filter them out. What are you? talking about? So if any, there must be so much of that happening.

JARED: Every HR group I've worked with since Capital One, where, you know, as head of data science at Measure One, as a chief data analytics officer at Pender Capital, I had very close relationships with the HR and both of those companies. I would always cut things up so that if I had something that I genuinely did not want to see a candidate without XYZ, for example, if we weren't sponsoring, if they required an H-1B, obviously those candidates are ineligible. If I'm insisting that they be co-located in Dallas, then any candidate that's more than 50 miles away from Dallas would be out as well. It just depends on what the nature of those crystal-clear things is that I can provide. HR, a clean rule, those are the things that I find it acceptable for them to filter on everything else. Send me a hundred, 200, 200 resumes. If I'm not willing to review 200 resumes to find a quality candidate, then I don't actually want a quality candidate that badly.

TIM: So you'd, you feel like that's fair game, that's your job, get it getting back to the original point. It's your main point of leverage to hire great people. It's your almost single most important thing you can do. Therefore, you should be willing and able to do a bit of the grunt work when it comes to the hiring.

JARED: Yeah. Now I will typically have them do initial interviews. And I'll have them typically do behavioral interviews. And I'll ask them what the nature of their red flags is. And if they say he seemed a little goofy, I'm like, That's not a red flag to me for this role, right? That's, we're going to pass that one. And basically the result of any interview I have with them, because I've reviewed their resume. I think they might have what it takes, and I get there; I get that feedback. I'm like, Let's hear them. Let's hear them. I don't want you to hold back quality candidates just because they're goofy. If, on the other hand, they're like, I really thought they were pretty dishonest. They started saying things different than what was on their resume. I was like, Can you go into details? And I can look at the resume and be like, Oh, I'd be pretty, that'd make me uncomfortable too. Probably go with HR on that one. Like, just understand the nature of what it is they're taking out there, which candidates they're removing from the process, because you want to make sure that they're not removing the exact candidates you want to hire.

TIM: Yes, I just spoke to someone earlier this morning who said that. Almost their entire hiring philosophy was to try to find diamonds in the rough. And so the way they thought about it was the most undervalued candidates were the ones who were really amazing at their job but interviewed poorly. So maybe candidates who are a little bit more introverted sometimes, maybe on the spectrum, sometimes socially awkward. And so the last thing you'd ever want is an HR or any screening process for that matter that actively removes those candidates, which it would be so easy to do because it's so easy to confuse. extroverted confidence with competence, and maybe someone is a little bit shy with not being smart, which is ridiculous.

JARED: But it does depend on the role, right? If the role was also doing a lot of consulting or a lot of sales, adjacent activity, those things can be relevant, like it or not. For data-related activities, for coding, and for business analysts, for the most part, it doesn't make that much of a difference in a consulting world, like a McKinsey or a Bain or a BCG, right? Those things do matter because they're going to be in front of people. They're going to be interacting with them, and they need to be able to establish a certain rapport.

TIM: Yeah. And so it just comes back to setting up the process to really select for what you actually need in the role. Nothing more, nothing less.

JARED: That's right.

TIM: Jared, if you could ask our next guest any question about hiring, what would you ask them?

JARED: I think one of the biggest questions about hiring is. For people who use AI, for example, how do you protect against the massive amount of bias that's present in your historical hiring process, whatever organization you're part of, because we're building these models off of data that contains it? All of the biases that we are familiar with, right? You've seen the studies from the late nineties on our hiring process, which tends to favor men over women, tends to favor Caucasians over non-Caucasians, and tends to favor all sorts of groups that you are well aware of as protected classes, right? How is it? Because when you're building a model on that data, it's just going to get quicker. Answer that is identical to the same process. So the question I would ask is how are you trying to fix your data or fix your process so that your automated AI screening isn't getting it out? Maybe an even cleaner question, right? How are you using AI in a way that is beneficial to identifying the actual candidates you want, rather than just replicating the existing kind of messed-up hiring strategy that we have all been living in?

TIM: A couple of questions yet that I will level at our next guest or guests, and I'll be interested to hear what they say, Jared. It's been a great conversation today. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing all your insights with our audience.

JARED: Thank you so much for having me, Tim. I really appreciate it.