It’s the start of the year and hiring plans for 2020 are being finalized across the Valley. Although, not if Softbank is your lead investor.. Too soon?

The sun will rise in the morning and set in the evening just as reliably as hiring managers failing to receive their full headcount requests. With the 2-3 chances you have to really get it right this year, forced to measure a candidate’s entire capability set in a 1-3 hour game of darts, there are TWO essential attributes you absolutely need to get right. No biggie. Just two!

Originally sourced from Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, these attributes come to us via his conversation with Reid Hoffman on the Masters of Scale podcast in June 2017. He put hiring into a beautifully simple memorable framework that has been consistently reinforced in interview rooms time and time again:

Persistence + Curiosity = 📈

Relevant skills? Of course. Attitude? Yes. Attention to detail? Ideally.

But if you can bringing in people with demonstrated persistence and curiosity, you can do a lot worse.

From the experience of dozens of interviews, here are some ways to successfully draw these attributes out:

Persistence:

• How have you overcome a difficult situation in your last role?
  • Everyone asks this right? But keep going! Persist in getting to the bottom! Most hiring managers will stop after the initial response. Have them walk through the situation. Well what about this? And what about that? Make sure they dissect the whole experience right in front of you. What would they do differently now if they could experience it again?
• Could you describe a new skill you taught yourself?
  • How did they learn it? How long did it take them to learn? What did they do when they encountered resistance learning a new thing from scratch?
• Could you describe what hard work means to you?
  • This usually has the effect of allowing them to recount an experience that led them to this belief. At the very least an interesting question which can prompt an interesting answer

Curiosity:

• What do you think are some interesting trends in *our* industry?
  • Has this person actually done any research and have interest in joining our company for reason A, B & C?
  • Will they or have they dug into the market because they actually want to know the answers for why this role at this company is interesting?
• If you could work in any industry other than (insert industry of company currently interviewing for) what would it be and why?
  • This one consistently separates the curious ones with hobbies and tastes and thoughtfulness across a range of interests from the…less curious ones
  • What they can do today + what they want to grow into a year or more from now + how they think about that growth can be pulled out here
• What is something that happened to you recently that you failed to anticipate? And why?
  • Curious folks usually have a good answer for this because they like to understand how things work and remember when they’ve been wrong about some underpinning assumptions they previously worked hard to understand

That’s it.

And if you want to figure out which type of interviewee you’re dealing with, check out some scientific profiling of the archetypes here.

How about that weather this weekend? What do you like to do for fun? Ah, interviewing. The creativity out there..