Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO with Brian Halligan
00:13:33 · Brian Halligan
[00:13:33] S1: It sounds like kind of a data science type team that is looking at all the inbound and is looking for signals. What are the signals that are most strongly correlated with success? The R squared is high. And then once you get beyond that, I assume there's a human interview. What are the questions that tease out what you're looking for that maybe aren't obvious?
00:13:54 · Luca Ferrari
[00:13:54] S0: Yeah, so we are fairly, fairly secretive about the details. I guess you get a similar answer from my quantitative trader. Again, that was my my metaphor earlier. But now I can share some some of this. There are some obvious signals in people's applications, you know, the their GPA, for example, it's not super strong, but it's helpful. The university graduated from, I think people will be surprised by how poorly graduating from Harvard or Stanford predicts performance. Like people think, Oh, you must be a genius. No, actually, yeah, you're probably a little bit stronger people graduating in other universities, but not so much stronger. Often we find that people tend to lose some of that potential raw talent edge by being a bit more entitled and thinking too highly of themselves. But it's still predictive. I mean, all else being equal, someone from Harvard will do a little bit better than someone from a less well known university. So some of those are probably somewhat obvious. There are many that are not. One I can share is relatively predictable. I was surprised when this came up. We found that if someone is politically active as a teenager, but ceases to be in their early 20s, that tends to correlate highly with someone's drive and entrepreneurial mindset. And the way we have explained it is, at least at Bending Spoons are highly valued qualities, the way we've explained it is that if you are 17 years old and school is not enough, you feel like you need to do more, shows agency, that shows productivity, that shows a level of not settling for the status quo that's generally healthy. But if you still do that when you're 25, 26, 30, it means it's probably a life mission, which is perfectly fine, but likely incompatible with your job, your career being, you know, a top priority. Your job is probably probably takes a back seat to your political aspirations.
00:16:06 · Brian Halligan
[00:16:06] S1: How do you find that signal? Do you ask them that question in an interview? Do you look through their old Instagram? Like how does that signal even arise in the process?
00:16:15 · Luca Ferrari
[00:16:15] S0: Thankfully, people think they need to include leadership experiences in their CVs because that gets you a job at a consulting company or something. So most people we find would include something significant in that area if they did it. But in any case, we do ask later in the process, whether it's an interview or written assessments, questions that would very clearly lend themselves to people sharing this sort of thing. With this, I'll get to the other thing you can do, which is you shouldn't be passive in accepting whatever signals are present in someone's application. You can be very proactive. We find that a lot of the best signals in our case come from the practical tests, the things we do or ask candidates to go through. And so you can elicit signals that way. Interviews are of all the typical elements in a selection process, at least in our experience, they are the worst predictors, but you can make them decent if you give interviewer interviewers extremely precise questions they need to ask, and you tell them to ask them exactly in the same way. And then you you make sure that the answers are recorded and assessed separately. So you what's completely useless pretty much is having someone talk to someone else with essentially no guidelines or just a high level agenda. And then tell you I like the guy I didn't like the guy that noise pretty much. So if you structure a lot and you try to separate the actual conducting of the interview from the evaluation of the responses, then it can be somewhat predictive.
00:17:56 · Brian Halligan
[00:17:56] S1: Can I tell you about HubSpot unlocked on the sales side a good process for doing this where we scaled our inside sales org from 10 to a thousand, where lots of, we're kind of like you, we had a better, it was harder to get into HubSpot than Harvard? So we had lots of inbound and we would look at all the resumes and we would look for people who went to a state school, went to University of Vermont, University of Wisconsin. We weren't looking for Harvard and MIT. And we looked for a person who had done a sport, who was athletic and competitive. And we didn't think too much about it. We didn't interview them in a standard way. We just said, if they look kind of like this, let's give them a half an hour. We give them a half an hour with a person. And what that person would do was set up a role play. So I would be the HubSpot employee, you'd be the potential. I'd set it up and then I'd have you sell to me and I'd give you twelve minutes to sell to me. So selling me whatever, and I'm hearing, I'm giving you objections, we finish it. Then I would give you feedback, Luca, on how you did. I'd you a minute to think about it, and then we'd do the exact same thing again. And if the person absorbed that feedback and did a half decent job at the pitch, we would do a couple of blind references. Boom, we hired them. That actually really ended up scaling for us. We didn't do the normal interviews. That really worked on the sales side. Because I kind of agree with you. The other thing I wanted to ask you about is just blind references. Is that in your signal?
00:19:33 · Luca Ferrari
[00:19:33] S0: Yeah, do that as the very last step. So no, we don't do actually blind references. We do references. We don't do blind references because they're illegal in Italy, you can't ask. And so we figured, Okay, let's just have a method that works across jurisdictions, even though I know in The US, you can call people and ask, Oh, I was this team member. We do reference is that it's the it's the candidate who presents a few names, we try to guide it toward, give me people who had plenty of exposure, we try to get at least one person for at least the couple of biggest experiences someone had. They and, know, ideally their manager if possible, but ultimately it's their call. We structured those interviews references quite a lot as well. And we find that they can be predictive. But again, you need to be scientific about it. If you leave it to someone picking up the phone and calling, then almost always it's positive. Very early do people give you names of people who criticize them. So you need to be very specific in your questions and ask to make hard grading decisions. For example, we ask them, okay, of the 20 people you have worked with the most, say something like this, Would you say this person is the best or top five? Then you try to ask a few follow-up questions to make sure there's a little substance behind that response, you find that people who are enthusiastic often they will tell you, well, it's above average. And you're like, know, hold on a sec. It sounded like this person was a genius and you're telling me it's maybe, you know, ranked eight out of 20, which is nice. But you know, so you can make it predictive, but you need to put in the effort and the structure before you get there.