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All Hiring Decisions Are a Gamble (and That’s Okay).
Hiring is filled with uncertainty. It always will be. And uncertainty is the realm of gamblers.
You wish it weren’t true.
In a just world, people would be hired on their merits. Skilled managers would know exactly what qualifications they needed for the team. Candidates would go through a rigorous (but humane!) interview process to assess the needed expertise without bias. Compensation would be transparent and fair regardless of your location or your ability to negotiate. In a just world, the objectively best candidate would win every time.
That is not our world.
In our world, hiring managers make bets. They plop down large piles of money for the chance of making even more money with this person’s help. And they do so based on imperfect knowledge. They don’t really know what the future holds for their team. They don’t really know how the candidate will perform in their environment. And they don’t really know that much about a candidate based on a few conversations — especially when the candidate is the only one is guaranteed to profit if the manager place that bet.
Nothing you can do can change that. You will never be able to tell the future. Trial periods are only a marginally better approximation of work, and interview alternatives still provide an incomplete picture of a candidate’s skills and potential. Even extremely thorough vetting processes like security clearances don’t entirely eliminate risk.
Companies wish it weren’t true. At time of writing, the first page of Google search results for “hiring is a gamble” is one well written but misguided thinkpiece, one quora question wondering why companies risk external hires rather than internal promotions (sorry, promotions are still a gamble), and eight articles selling some tool or process that promises to objectively quantify human aptitude. Companies resort to all sorts of things to treat hiring like anything but an expensive wager. They imagine people to be resources to be mined, or like gentle elephants they need to save from poaching, or maybe like ordering humans off of a menu. “I’d like two software engineers, medium rare, with a side of QA.”
