I’m not sure who originally told us about the Sunday test and the Caller ID test, but if they remind me I would certainly like to thank them. These two very simple ideas have kept us from making some very bad hires, and have convinced us to make others that were great. The Sunday test is as follows: if the candidate is in at the office alone on a Sunday afternoon, would you be more likely to come in and work with them? That answer has to be yes. We want to be excited by our colleagues, and not feel like we’re holding them up or they’re dragging us down. The Caller ID test is equally important, and is as follows: if the candidate calls you on a Friday night and wants to spend time hanging out or working, are you more likely to pick up or let it ring to voicemail? If you wouldn't pick up the phone, that candidate is the wrong hire.
Argh. These rules are toxic. You are unlikely to predict your best hires. A lot of evidence suggests that engineers are uniformly bad at making subjective judgements about future performance. The "Sunday" and "Caller ID" rules basically put a deceptive veneer on the most subjective of all criteria: the "gut check".
That's bad enough, but both rules also have a pernicious culture effect. In companies full of 20-something Red Bull drinking 11a-9p gamer nerds, the rule gets you more gamer nerds. In companies full of 30-somethings with kids, you get more people with kids. This is exactly what you don't want to have happen; a real culture adapts to any positive competent person you find. Good cultures figure out down the road how to get people to hang out outside of work. They also accept people who just don't want to spend their out-of-work time with their officemates. Why would you want to filter those people out? That property has no known correlation to ability or performance.
Finally: do you really want to be the hiring manager who says out loud that you have a rule built into your hiring process that involves people working on Sunday? Don't make people work on Sunday.
Argh. These rules are toxic. You are unlikely to predict your best hires. A lot of evidence suggests that engineers are uniformly bad at making subjective judgements about future performance. The "Sunday" and "Caller ID" rules basically put a deceptive veneer on the most subjective of all criteria: the "gut check".
That's bad enough, but both rules also have a pernicious culture effect. In companies full of 20-something Red Bull drinking 11a-9p gamer nerds, the rule gets you more gamer nerds. In companies full of 30-somethings with kids, you get more people with kids. This is exactly what you don't want to have happen; a real culture adapts to any positive competent person you find. Good cultures figure out down the road how to get people to hang out outside of work. They also accept people who just don't want to spend their out-of-work time with their officemates. Why would you want to filter those people out? That property has no known correlation to ability or performance.
Finally: do you really want to be the hiring manager who says out loud that you have a rule built into your hiring process that involves people working on Sunday? Don't make people work on Sunday.
The sooner we kill the "Sunday rule", the better.