This article was written by Ken Leaver who comes from a product & commercial background. He has founded multiple companies and held senior product positions at SEA tech companies like Lazada and Pomelo Fashion.
Now Ken runs his own agency that helps early stage startups with content and traction called End Game.
Guest Author: Ken Leaver
Testing and managing someone directly for even just a couple weeks will literally beat interviewing someone 99 times out of 100 in my experience
And I don’t get why lots of companies still don’t get this yet… they are still wasting so much time & money on recruiters… when they instead should be putting in systems like ‘paid work trials’ so that they’re always testing before hiring.
So this evening I was watching Shaan Puri talk on “My First Million” podcast (one of my favorite podcasts) about a business that he’s invested in called SupportShepherd.
SupportShepherd is a model where they provide vetted offshort talent (from Philippines and Latam) to companies that are mainly in the US.
And at this exact point in the video (click below) he’s talking about how SupportShepherd has tons of ‘recruiters’ on the ground in Philippines doing this ‘vetting’.
Now i’ve literally hired and managed (mainly via Upwork) at least 50+ people from Philippines alone in the last three years for everything from VA’s, Customer support, developers, designers, outbound callers, etc.
And I have a system where I often start 3-4 on a small scope for 1-2 weeks with the intent of keeping one (the best one).
I also like keeping mental notes on who I ‘would have hired’ based just on the short interview call that I do before they start.
My rough statistics are that the person i kept was the person I ‘would have hired’ based on the interview only about 40% of the time.
60% of the time I would have gotten it wrong.
And note that I am the business operator (that has interviewed hundreds of people) doing these interviews… so i will probably do them better then some ‘recruiter’ who has zero operating experience.
Which tells you SO MUCH about the flaws of relying on interviews.
