Hiring as the marriage problem

At one point in my career, our company was hiring for role of a Head of Marketing. I got a strong referral from a friend, reached out, the match was great, and she passed the interview process with ease.

And then we just... sat on it. The hiring manager said he wanted to consider three candidates and then pick the best. Unfortunately, when we had the second person at the end of the funnel, the first one had already churned. Eventually, we settled on someone okay, but it has always bothered me that we missed the brilliant one.

This reflects a core misunderstanding in hiring (in the context of high-tech startups, but I think it applies more broadly). Sometimes there is a line out the door with hundreds of skilled, credentialed, talented, highly motivated applicants. It probably used to be this way at Google, and is today at top AI companies.

But the rest of the world should treat hiring more akin to the marriage problem. That is, you make a decision about each candidate individually -- they either pass or fail -- and cannot collect a pool of ready applicants to then pick the top one out of three.

It's hard. You will be making a decision on an absolute basis ("is this person good enough?") rather than on a relative basis ("which of the candidates is best?"). To hire on a relative basis, you just need to be able to compare candidates to each other, which is easy, especially if done in a relative short span of time. But to hire on an absolute basis, you need to be clear on what you really need from a role (not easy!), what kinds of traits predict that (harder!) and be able to evaluate those from just a few hours of interaction (hardest!).

It's not rocket science, really. I'm just pointing it out because I have seen this kind of failure mode -- an approach I hadn't even considered simply because I most of my hireconstrained by talent supply.