It is not what they know, but what they will know

Okay… let me clarify that sentence. When hiring a person, you often outline your decision based on skillset, current and former experience, school, education, earlier employment etc. As all of these things do play a big role in the decision making and certain parts should be taken into account, there are sometimes assets that are of much greater value, which can’t be determined from a fancy Word file and a nervous interview.

Sometimes I find myself intimidated by programmers, who seem to just know exactly what they are doing. How they just type away, and achieve awesomeness, until I stumble across a live coding session with them and realise that they go through a lot of the same processes I do.

One thing I think is important to take into account in hiring people is, what would he/she do in a situation where they get stuck? This happens for everybody, and the way we handle the situation is so much different from person to person. If you are dealing with an experienced yet stubborn designer and they hit a design block, you can pretty much send them home for the rest of the day. They won’t be productive, and in some cases they may even be a distraction in the workspace due to their incapacity to move on.

I like the “idea” of Google’s interviews. Now I haven’t had a personal interview with Google and can only speak from the reference in movie “The Internship” with Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson – but the point of the interview was to ask a question completely out of scope, which made the candidates having to think is new patterns and solve a completely unforeseen issue.

Bottom line is, maybe I don’t know how to manage the Brush settings in Photoshop, or know how to map an Object in JavaScript, but I will tomorrow. So when considering hiring a person to be part of your team, it is important to consider their ability to learn and gain experience from being part, or if their skill set is limited to only being able to highlight sentences on paper with a Yellow highlighter facing South-east while having four blue porcelain figures surrounding their cup of Columbian coffee..

Don’t want the struggle of hiring? – Get a consultant.