Interviewing and Evaluating Candidates

"I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter."

"How can they leverage this technology to do so much more? We'll give people interviews where we say, 'Use whatever tools are available to build a website and let's see what product you're able to build in an hour.'"

"I think CEOs and everyone dramatically overrates their ability to interview, and overrates their gut feeling, and underrates a really high quality blind reference."

"It's also a great way to have positive selection in terms of talent because talent wants to join companies that ship fast. And a lot of people who join Ramp, I ask them, 'Why are you interested in joining the company?' And they often say, 'Well, it's because you guys are actually building things and shipping things and I want to know what that feels like.'"

"Ambiguity is a big one for me, because at the end of the day, the PM job is really ambiguous. It's really hard to describe on a piece of paper all the things that you're going to encounter. Good answers are people who put structure and a way forward through the ambiguity."

""Describe to me a time when you were part of a controversial product decision. What did you do?" All those things. I think it's really revealing, because if they can set up this conflict and understand why this problem was really important and represent both sides and such that you can understand why that conflict existed in the first place, and they can do it in this kind of even-keeled way where you realize that they can take on these different perspectives, you start to learn a lot about that person, I think."

"I think this is something I saw when we would have some pockets of analytics folks embedded is having a consistent bar for talent in terms of what we're looking for, what are the technical skills, what are the soft skills? And being able to evaluate candidates with that same bar, using our same rubric."

"It's just like when you're interviewing someone, giving them tough feedback after the interview if there's an area of concern, but you otherwise like them, can be a really great way to see how they would interact with you personally as well as how they take feedback. And so that was my learning from the situation, is if you really enjoy an interview, except for maybe something on the culture side, to give the direct feedback and see how people engage."

"When you get to offer stage, I send an email and I say all the terrible things that are probably going to reinforce their fears. If you can tell them that upfront and they can read that whole email and still be equally excited to join you, find yourself a A+ hire."

"Finding people who are high agency and work with urgency, if I was hiring five people today, those are some of the top two characteristics that I would look for in people because you can take on the world if you have people who have high agency and not needing to get 50 people's different consensus."

"I think they looked for two main things. They looked for first principles thinkers, so not necessarily your experience, but how do you approach problems, how do you know the right questions to ask? And then create your own framework around that. Dropbox also hired for people that were just really humble, collaborative and team oriented."

"And so that was the other thing is we would pull all of this forward into the interview process and talk about it and basically say like, 'Hey, if this is not how you think, that's okay. We're not better than you, you're not better than us, it's just this is how we do things here.'"

"In 6 months, if I'm telling you what to do, I've hired the wrong person. It helps me and the person operate on a different level where the goal is not, did you hit this OKR? The Meta goal becomes, are we calibrating enough? Are we actually getting into a spot where in 6 months you're the one telling me what needs to be done?"

"I generally value the reference check over interview signals. If I had to stack rank in interviews, what is the best signal? The reference check is the top of the list. Those people, they worked with this person sometimes for years, their knowledge, what you're going to get out of 30 minutes of artificial scenarios it's just like never going to compare what a good reference check will give you."