Graham Duncan’s “What’s Going On Here, With This Human?”

Excerpts from Graham Duncan’s “What’s Going On Here, With This Human?” (Link)

Interviewing is really a narrow application of a broader art. Duncan begins:

The philosopher Kwame Appiah writes that “in life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.”

When I try to figure out what game I’m playing, I see that for the last 25 years I have been playing a game of strategy applied to people, a game where over and over I try to answer the question “what’s going on here, with this human?”  In this essay, I make recommendations about candidate selection based on thousands of assessments I have made and my somewhat obsessive interest in the topic.

My goal in this essay is to help others make better decisions on a potential hire, business partner, or even life partner as quickly and as accurately as possible.  It’s made up of suggested action steps and some of the ruminations that underlie them. At the end I include my own assessment of different personality assessments and some of my go-to interview and reference questions.

These notes are select excerpts from the essay that I want to keep as a reference. My favorite line from the entire essay:

One of the greatest gifts we have for each other, for our children and spouses, for our teammates, is the positive feedback loop we can put someone into purely by believing in them, by seeing their genius and their dysfunction clearly and then helping them construct conditions for the former to flourish.

That emphasis is mine. I consider this to be one of the cheapest forms of human capital and this essay is ultimately about allocating that capital.

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From the introduction

My summary: When we interview someone for a job we are looking for signs that they will do the job well. But when our goal is to “see someone clearly”, our focus shifts to finding the best role for them.

Excerpt

It can be useful, when interviewing someone, to take Rumelt’s cue and ask explicitly: what’s going on here with this person in front of me?  The more I’ve done it, the more I realize that what most people think of as the hard parts of hiring—asking just the right question that catches the candidate off guard, defining the role correctly, assessing the person’s skills—are less important than a more basic task: how do you see someone, including yourself, clearly?

Seeing people clearly—or at least more clearly—matters not just when finding the “best” hire, but in identifying the best role for them. Even looking at those of us who are lucky enough to have a high degree of choice about what we do with our work, I’ll bet that as few as 20% of us are in the seat that best optimizes our talents and skills at any given time—the seat that makes us feel at home in the world. That’s not good for the 80%, and it’s not good for their teams either.

The poet David Whyte describes the unfolding of life and career as a “conversation with reality”:

Whatever a human being desires for themselves will not come about exactly as they first imagined it or first laid it out in their minds…what always happens is the meeting between what you desire from your world and what the world desires of you. It’s this frontier where you overhear yourself and you overhear the world.And that frontier is the only place where things are real…in which you just try to keep an integrity and groundedness while keeping your eyes and your voice dedicated toward the horizon that you’re going to, or the horizon in another person you’re meeting.

Whyte captures how hiring can be an art form. When you see people clearly, you see the transcript of their conversation with reality up until that moment of your meeting, and you glimpse the horizon that stretches out ahead of them. And then sometimes you can help them overhear themselves and overhear what the world wants from them, whether or not that includes working in the role that you had initially imagined for them.

Part I: Seeing your Reflection in the Window

My summary: The role of being an interviewer can affect your judgment in ways in which you are not aware.

Excerpt

If I picture my thirty-year-old self doing an interview, I see him as the friend looking through the window: not seeing the way his mind was constantly making snap judgments about the candidate, creating stories with the slightest bit of material, “I like this,” “I don’t like that.” He would project his reality onto the reality of the other person, missing that, for instance, often even very senior people are not their usual selves in a formal interview setting, that there’s a power dynamic that he should not take lightly. He would not yet be aware that while his sensitivity to being hustled is a gift, it also creates a blind spot that causes him to mistakenly pass on a particularly good sales person or someone who is earlier in their career and still relies on jargon or cliché.

Part II: Seeing the Elephants in the Room

My summary: There are meta-techniques for overcoming your own blindspots

Excerpt

So let’s reframe the interview process: there are two elephants in the room, yours and that of the person you’re trying to see. The bad news is that you’re mostly blind to both elephants. The good news is that there are a lot of other riders who’ve traveled alongside the other rider and elephant. If you take your perspective on the rider and your glimpses of his or her elephant, and add everyone else’s experience of the rider and their elephant, and then control a bit for your own elephant and the references’ own elephants, you can get a good sense of how the candidate’s rider-elephant combination behaves.

Diving into techniques:

• During interviews, I try to create a stillness that helps separate signal from noise, elephants from riders.

  During interviews, I try to create a stillness that helps separate signal from noise, elephants from riders. The easiest way to create conditions of stillness is to talk very little. It also helps to have the candidate you’re trying to see clearly ask you questions. Questions have very high signal value compared to most anything else you can get from a candidate. This is harder to do in practice than you might think—you need to make the candidate feel safe enough to ask their true questions, and you need to answer concisely or you’ll run out of time (which is particularly hard if the person asks good questions). I write down each question and sometimes respond with “I’ll answer, but first I’m curious, why did you ask that?” I’m looking for the felt sense of a “hungry mind” based on the way their questions flow. That’s very hard to fake.

  I like asking up-front, “So what criteria would you use if you were the one hiring someone for this role?” I love this question because of how unexpected the answers are. Some are tactical when you expect abstraction. Some improve your own criteria. Some use jargon that may indicate they are playing someone else’s game versus authoring their own. All are quite revealing.
  

• I now consider in-person references with someone who knows the candidate well 5x more valuable than an interview. They can be 10x more valuable when you are already in a high-trust relationship with the reference-giver, and the reference-giver is in a position to see the candidate clearly, with no agendas and few blind spots of their own.
  
  • Given the importance of references, the highest purpose of your own interview with a candidate might be to improve your ability to conduct reference interviews, where you hold your own view as just one in a collection of views. This requires an ability to hold multiple perspectives at once. This is difficult to do because your own impressions from the interview are so vivid and multi-sensory, and everyone else’s views are mainly conveyed through language. In my experience, holding your own perspective alongside those of references should feel slightly uncomfortable and disorienting, or you’re doing it wrong. You should find the candidate confusing at times. If you first see their dysfunction, you should know you have yet to find their genius, and vice versa.
    
  • I try to conduct references with an eye to quirky forms of excellence. When I’m on the receiving end of reference calls, I notice that the caller is often subtly framing the exercise with a mildly suspicious “gotcha” vibe (“so why did George leave after only two years?”). I don’t find that particularly effective; it tends to make me shut down as a reference giver. Instead, when I’m calling someone, I try to imagine myself as head of people operations for the entire hedge fund or private equity ecosystem, that I’m agnostic as to where they should sit and just trying to help them get to the best spot.  That mindset seems to allow me to size up people more generously and accurately, and to accommodate more quirkiness…I also try to stick to the default assumption that “everyone is an A player at something.” It’s a more effective and more dynamic way to approach an interview—a live, fascinating puzzle to discover what the elephant and the rider do well—rather than going in with the purpose of determining whether someone is an A player in a binary, Manichean way. I prefer to imagine that I’m trying to find the candidate the best possible job for them; it may be the job I had in mind, or something else altogether.
    
  • As your sample size of references goes up, you can begin to calibrate on the credibility of the reference giver (what’s their sample size? What are their biases?) as well as to tune into what a “table-pounding” reference sounds like. Fourteen years later I still remember a reference I did for our CFO hire: the woman who had worked with him had a tone of “why are you wasting your time talking to me and not spending your time trying to convince him to join you?”

  • The hardest part is understanding the dog that doesn’t bark. If you don’t hear that table-pounding from someone who knows the reference well, is it contextual in some way (the person is tired, you caught them right after a tough conversation, they are jealous, etc.) or is there signal there? It’s one element of the process that requires the 10,000 hours of practice to get calibrated.

 

Part III: Seeing the Water

My summary: After making best efforts to illuminate your own blindspots, you also need to consider the context from which the candidate you are evaluating emerges.

Excerpt

I now believe that there is no such thing as an A player in the abstract, across all time, in whatever ecosystem they end up in.

Considering the candidates’ context:

• When you’re taking someone from one ecosystem to another, changing their context, you have to try to see the water in both.
  • It’s disruptive and risky to take someone out of the setting in which they’re thriving, since there are a lot of subtle things going on in the original that may not be immediately obvious. How much of their success depends on the water in the first ecosystem?  Was there someone there who believed in them that set a positive feedback loop in motion that may not persist across systems? Try to understand as much as possible about “what’s going on here” in the candidate’s prior ecosystem. For instance in the investment management context, often a portfolio manager will run a large idea by their boss and subtle reactions (a raised eyebrow, a long pause) will cause them to actually size the position smaller.  That constant tension is constructive, and if you take the portfolio manager out of that container they will not perform in the same way in the absence of the tension. This particularly applies to people who leave to start their own companies—in part because they may have a hard time recreating the culture and context that allowed them to thrive when they worked in a structure designed by someone else.

  • It’s even possible that strengths in one context become weaknesses in another. Take someone who is super motivated and who loves to win, but because of this competitiveness doesn’t give as much as they get from peers. In one ecosystem they develop a reputation as a talented “taker” that people are wary of, while in another they are celebrated without reservation.

  • It’s even possible that strengths in one context become weaknesses in another. Take someone who is super motivated and who loves to win, but because of this competitiveness doesn’t give as much as they get from peers. In one ecosystem they develop a reputation as a talented “taker” that people are wary of, while in another they are celebrated without reservation.
    

Discussion of Personality Tests

The Big 5 or OCEAN personality test

My summary: I have noticed this is a favorite of the tech world. Marc Andreesen addresses the focus on ‘concientiousness’ in his interview on education (my notes here). Founder Slava Akhmechet says the Big 5 personality traits “are kind of like Myers Briggs, except real.”

Excerpt

There are thousands of studies using the Big Five. Within psychology, it’s the equivalent of gravity, and at this point, nearly everyone in academia finds it a useful mental model for personality. Sam Barondes’ book Making Sense of People is a great introduction to the Big Five. I tracked down Sam and asked him about the book’s raison d’être. He told me that he wrote it because he knew the Big Five was solid as science but had noticed that, in his own hiring in the medical department at UCSF as well as among the fancy tech CEOs he counseled, no one was actually using it in practice.

ghSMART 

My summary: A high-signal form of interviewing described in Geoff Smart’s book Who and his father Brad Smart’s book Topgrading. 

Excerpt

“Resourcefulness” is the meta competency:  

Resourcefulness is the single most important competency, so here’s my advice: look for evidence of Resourcefulness 100% of the time as you evaluate candidates. Imagine that you have special magical glasses that register through the lens whether the candidate is, at this moment, revealing Resourcefulness and maybe then it flashes green, or lack of Resourcefulness and maybe then it flashes red. I’m making the point that Resourcefulness is not a competency you first think of after the interview while you’re reviewing your notes. You must constantly ask yourself, “Does that example, what I’m seeing, what I’m feeling, what I’m hearing, show Resourcefulness, or lack of it?” 

I sometimes imagine I’ve dropped the candidate I’m interviewing on a desert island and I come back five years later. Some people I’d worry about, some people I wouldn’t. The Y Combinator application question “what’s a system or game you’ve hacked in the last year?” is a good arrow in the quiver when exploring the resourcefulness dimension.

Guide to References

• Preparing for reference calls

  Before calling references, Duncan and his team review these points:

• • There are two kinds of information: public information and private information. Our personal assessments of our peers and former employees are firmly in the bucket of private information. That’s both what makes references valuable, and what makes them hard to get.
  • Your mission is to collect as many private assessments on your candidate as possible.
  • Remind yourself that your base case is that you will not proceed with the candidate despite the fact you’re at the stage of doing references. You want to create a default mindset that listening to the references is going to actively make you change your mind to make the hire. “Let the references speak” is our mantra.
  • For each candidate there is often one reference that is the motherlode, the Yoda reference—the unbiased, calibrated, no bullshit, clear-eyed reference, someone with “acerbic good taste” who has experienced your candidate with limited ego baggage of their own and is willing to transfer that private information to you. Sometimes you get them on the first call, sometimes it’s on the 20th call. Have you found that reference giver yet? If not and the context permits, do not proceed with the hire, allow yourself to hold the uncertainty.
  • Assess whether the reference giver is calibrated—what’s their sample size and do they actually know what excellence in this role is? (Assume 80% of people are not calibrated on the Michael Jordan of this thing.)
  • Assess whether you find the reference givers themselves credible. Identify any biases. Would you hire the reference givers or want to work for them? If not, make sure you weight the content of the reference slightly lower.
  • Try to mess with the expected “script” of a reference conversation, where the reference giver reads a LinkedIn testimonial and you read from a check-list of questions. Skim the questions below in advance in order to have them in mind, but try not to read from the list because it creates a different dynamic, more interrogation and less creative exploration and appreciation of someone’s idiosyncrasies.
  • The dog that doesn’t bark is the hardest thing to assess and requires calibration / a big sample size —what could they say on the positive side but are not saying?
  • Do references in person if you can, Zoom is second best, phone is third best.
  • Start with an opener that makes it safe to convey private information: “Thanks for taking the time. I’m trying to find the right seat for Jane and I’m investing the time in speaking to people who know her. Everything you say will be off the record, and I don’t plan on conveying any of it back to Jane.”

• Reference questions
  • How would you describe Jane to someone who doesn’t know her?
  • What’s your sample size of people in the role in which you knew Jane?
  • Who was the best person at this role that you’ve ever seen?
  • If we call that person a “100”, the gold standard, where’s Jane right now on a 1-100?
  • Does she remind you of anyone else you know?
  • If Jane’s number comes up on your caller ID, what does your brain anticipate she’s going to be calling about? What’s the feeling?
  • Three attributes I like to keep in mind are someone’s hunger, their humility, and how smart they are about people. If you were to force rank those for Jane from what she exhibits the most to least, how would you rank them?
  • What motivates Jane at this stage of her life?
  • If you were coaching Jane, how would you help her take her game up?
  • If you were going to hire someone to complement Jane doing the same activity (NOT a different role), what would they be good at to offset Jane’s strengths and weaknesses?
  • How strong is your endorsement of Jane on a 1-10? (If they answer 7, say actually sorry 7s are not allowed, 6 or 8? If the answer is an 8, “What is in that two points?”)

Guide to Interviews

• Preparing for interviews
  
  • Remember that your mission is primarily to get to know the person well enough to do effective reference checks
  • Can you glimpse the person’s elephant as distinct from the rider, who is speaking to you?
  • Can you establish enough safety to allow the frame of “how can I help you find the best job for you in the world?” instead of “are you an A player, are you a fit for this role?”
  • Interrupt often to establish a fast cadence and avoid monologues

• Interview Questions
  • What criteria would you use to hire someone to do this job if you were in my seat?
  • How would your spouse or sibling describe you with ten adjectives?
  • I think we’re aligned in wanting this to be a good fit, you don’t want us to counsel you out in six months and neither do we. Let’s take the perspective of ourselves in six months and it didn’t work. What’s your best guess of what was going on that made it not work?
  • What are the names of your last five managers, and how would they each rate your overall performance on a 1-100?
  • What are you most torn about right now in your professional life?
  • How did you prepare for this interview?
  • How do you feel this interview is going?