Venture Capitalist have been using this technique for years now. There are a few out there who browse through countless PowerPoint presentations and every minute detail of your business model. Others however are more interested in knowing you as a person and every question they ask revolve around judging you as an individual.
As someone who has been given funding offers without any presentations, ideas or even asking for them, the aspects that some venture capitalist use to fund you, confused me, till I learnt first hand from a venture capitalist, that he was not interested in funding an idea. He was interested in funding the people who he thought were right people.
As an organization however, when you hire employees the equation seems to change dramatically and rather abruptly. We are suddenly concerned if a person knows what a Factory or a Facade is. We are so obsessed with skillets that we tend to forget that is it not the skill set you are hiring. It is the person.
Is the candidate smart? Is he upright? Is he honest? Will he go out of the way to help others? How is he going to handle setbacks? Is he a paycheck programmer?
Hiring a "good" human being should be on the top of your list when hiring.
Everything else is secondary.
Of course, the competence, the kickass programming skill-sets and years spent slogging on code helps, but if you are not spending enough time and energy evaluating the basic personality elements of a person, you are just hiring skill-sets, not people.
What would you rather hire? Three years of .NET or a helpful, enthusiastic programmer with kickass programming skills who happens to be really good at .NET?
The choice is yours. Just like the Venture Capitalists who prefer to fund "good people" over "good ideas" I prefer to hire good human beings with a smart mind over hiring a resume or a skill-set.
Ok, I am done with the post.
You can go ahead and call me stupid or impractical now or you can munch on this thought next time you go to take someone's interview.
I wish you good luck.
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