Seth Godin on Job Interviews: “Waste of Time”

More and more, I’m less and less of a fan of job interviews. I’d much rather; get straight to the work, determine if the project is cool, and if the people all around are fun to work with.

I think all meetings should produce some moving-the-project-forward artifact - new team member tryouts (the thing formerly known as a job interview) included.

Seth Godin sketches out a strategy for making this work:

“There are no one-on-one-sit-in-my-office-and-let’s-talk interviews. Boom, you just saved 7 hours per interview. Instead, spend those seven hours actually doing the work. Put the person on a team and have a brainstorming session, or design a widget or make some espressos together…If the person is really great, hire them. For a weekend. Pay them to spend another 20 hours pushing their way through something…”