Edurio’s core assumptions about hiring

Here are the principles we’ve adopted to build a recruitment process at Edurio.

First, the recruitment process needs to get a good signal to noise ratio, in order not to waste your time and the candidate’s time. Time is the most valuable resource in most cases, so we try and get as much as we can out of it. Famously, Google cut back its number of interviews from 12+ to 4, as additional information did not lead to substantially different hiring / not-hiring decisions.

Second, the candidate’s work culture generally matters more than their experience. If the company has not reached product-market fit yet, the roles and job descriptions will be a minimum viable product as much as the technology. The job is bound to change, and your new hire ought to be able to change with the company and remain a good fit for a while.

Third, hiring is a wicked problem so is difficult to improve through deliberate practice. Hiring is characterised by having high-stakes decisions, poor and slow feedback, and no clear indications of success. Doing more of it does not mean you will get better at it, so it does not make sense for hiring to be run by a “hiring specialist”. Interviewing and each separate step in the hiring process, however, is a much more kind problem with much more immediate feedback (you can reflect on the quality of your call notes or the interesting observations from an interview) so it is easier to deliberately practice and get better at that.

Finally, we’re likely to adapt the process for exceptions. If somebody’s been coming to our board game events and talking education for ages, the conversation is likely going to go a different route. If we’ve collaborated before as contractors, we already know what the candidates work outputs are, so any additional tasks will bring less information and might be skipped.