Start Up Hiring - Psycho for Metrics?

India has seen an unprecedented spurt in entrepreneurial ventures in the e-commerce / Internet space these last 5 years & an almost doubling rate in the last 2-3 years. A country where wave after wave of generations have been passed down the wisdom of saving, being prudent, thrifty & security conscious, irrespective of their financial well being, who always were seekers of jobs with security, being cautiously risk averse & believers in the 9 to 5 hard working office hours (which often stretched to later hours & overtimes)., to keep those very jobs, have seen a massive sea change & paradigm shift when it comes to changing career choices.

Until almost 7-8 years ago, when I used to hire for my own Recruitment start up, all the perks & special benefits I gave, would still make it challenging for new blood to be eager to want to come work for us. When I see the change today, when people in well settled cushy jobs with even Fortune 100 companies are making a bee line to work for start ups (& trust me, my skeptics part of the reading audience, it ain't always about the money. I've got some of em jobs with no more than a 15% hike & they still took it up. Primal hunter/survivor instinct, eh?), it warms my heart, having been a start up myself almost a decade ago.

So, Times of India, had an article about Start ups going bat shit crazy [my words, not theirs :)] about firing all guns whilst hiring, & about how they're now jumping onto the psychometrics bandwagon with all bells & whistles blaring to ensure they don't subscribe to erroneous hiring that is challenging & time consuming to recover from, all in the short, fast paced timelines, start ups today compete in.


Original article here: Startups Install Hiring Alarms, Filters


My two cents?

Working with start ups, like working anywhere else really, is about fulfilling the end to which you're hired for. In short? Doing your job. (Yes there are a ton of other cool things, which if I mention now, I'd be digressing) I personally am miles away from subscribing to the psychometrics bit for now, not because I am a skeptic (I love Thomas Assessments, personally), but because a test result acing the class wouldn't budge me, if some main, unavoidable parameters aren't considered first.
Now what ARE the main parameters of hiring & pre-hiring that a start up needs to keep in mind? For now, lets break it down to:

Expectations, Reality, the Job description & the Personality test.

Expectations: I must confess, I've seen my fair bit of delusional or even mildly misplaced expectations from both, people applying for jobs & sometimes even of employers having extreme expectations from a hire. A start up is an unexplored Wonderland where an employee is just expected to know he/she will take various potions [also known as business feedback :)] & super size or shrink themselves according to the doors they need to walk through. So I definitely wouldn't tell Alice, she's entering a suburban household when she's actually stepping into a Start up. So before you make a potential hire do 15 psychometric tests, pls ask/tell them, the actual scenario at work & how they'd cope, the answers could be refreshingly honest most times, & in any other case, if you're a seasoned recruiter, you'll know BS when you see it. In a start up environment, if anything, the disillusionment of/with a particular hire doesn't always happen because of skill to job deficit but rather for most times - because of the expectation to reality deficit. [Possibly, because of a well structured hiring checklist I keep, the earlier deficit is anyway not a possibility but, just saying, since in most cases, the disillusionment of the employee/employer happens because Talent Acquisition is incommunicado on the real details.]

Reality: Since there IS no honeymoon period with a start up, & you're rolling up your sleeves & getting to work from the moment you hit the floor (I remember closing my first position on the 2nd day of joining, its that fast.), reality dawns faster & hits you harder if you didn't hear about what you're doing or even not doing in your job interview with a prospective employer.
Secondly, everyone, & I mean everyone, wears many, many hats, if the start up culture is true to its roots & vision. If this reality is too Utopian or too dystopian for you (depending which side of the fence you're on), you''ll either expect to do too much or too little, which in any case is a loss of balance for your future in the company. So unless you're an adaptive chameleon & roll with the punches, this reality may be unsettling for you. And even though your psychometric test spells out loud & clear you're highly adaptive & change embracing, if this hasn't been put into perspective at the hiring stages, you'll possibly be knocking on your bosses door, saying, ''This isn't what I signed up for.''

The job description & the Personality test: When sometimes a job is fairly attractive to you & you have those beer goggles on, the finer nuances of a job description or job profile related anxieties are sometimes conveniently discarded to the wayside, equivalent of the proverbial date looking more attractive when you're a couple of drinks down. This halo effect (not just applicable to applicants only, but also to jobs themselves, don't you agree?) is sometimes rescued by a psychometric assessment done of prospective hires, & its time the cop asks the intoxicated incumbent to walk a straight line to prove their worthiness & clarity. Now these are also the type of situations when an indepth psychometric assessment helps to gauge incidents, behaviours, skills that the interviewee may/may not possess or present to the interviewer which are extremely significant to the job role. So, yes, I am not averse to them, in fact if used well, they can become excellent partners to the recruiting process.

Having said that, in environments as dynamic & ever changing as Start ups, clear communication of expectations & realities needs to form the bedrock of the interviewing process, & skills can continue to be gauged in subsequent processes on how interviewees react to such scenarios with garnered experience & academic backgrounds if/when required.


After all, the magical Wonderland that a start up is, it is also a proven catalyst that turns type A to B with its magic potions..what will just the metrics do? :)