Episode 108

Naveen Bhati on Rapid Decision Making in Startups: The Hire Fast, Fire Fast Approach and Its Impact on Business Dynamics

TIM: We are live on the Objective Hiring Show today. We're joined by Naveen. Naveen, welcome to the show.

NAVEEN: Thank you so much for having me.

TIM: It is absolutely our pleasure. And where I'd love to start is just hearing a little bit about yourself, just so our audience can start to think about who we're listening to today. Who is Naveen?

NAVEEN: Yeah. So I am head of engineering and AI at a company called TikTok. Now that may sound like the other TikTok video-sharing app that is currently famous because of all the bans and everything going on in the US. But the TikTok I work for is a software consultancy based in the UK. And we are currently building several AI-powered products to kind of help every stakeholder within the software development life cycle to automate. Many aspects of it to improve productivity and optimize performance and things like that. During my 14 years of career in engineering, I've pretty much worn all hats, all the way from being a QA software architect, DevOps engineer, and infrastructure guy to having done a little bit of business. Analyst and scrum master side of things as well. I finally decided to kind of head into leadership and strategic roles. And that journey took me to Meta where I, where I was engineering lead, but doing a lot of strategic kind of, kind of work and leadership type work supported that one of their B2B SaaS product called Workplace. Many of you may have used it, and then I moved on to a company called Improbable, which used to build, which is building actually, games and Metaverse solutions. And that was a thrilling experience for me. And that journey kind of brought me to TikTok here, where I'm building AI-powered products. My engineering background is actually in electronics and electrical engineering, but that's a different story to tell us at some other point, how I got into software from electronics.

TIM: Yeah, quite, quite a change, but then I can think of several software engineers. I know who also started by studying electrical engineering. So maybe it's not that much of a bridge to gap.

NAVEEN: Probably not. I think in my case, when I finished my university, I got a job. Into a telematics company. They were building these tracking devices that get fitted into cars, trucks, and vans. And they needed someone who had knowledge of both electronics. So someone can read those green boards and schematics and all those kinds of things and play around with soldering and cables and stuff. And at the same time has got interest or knowledge of software development so that they can automate the validation and testing part of the tracking. And that kind of nicely fit into my. experience. So I knew about electronics plus interest in software development and managed to kind of reduce their testing time from months to days, basically. So that's how I kind of got into electronics and software development.

TIM: Do you ever still dabble at home, any kind of DIY projects where you're doing your own electrical work, or is that a little bit too dangerous?

NAVEEN: Not too dangerous, but The last type of robotics work I've done, electronics, electric, and electronics-type work, was building a robotic arm. Controlled by a Bluetooth gyroscope so you can, you know, move your hands around, build a glove, and things like that. But that was about seven, eight years ago, just to kind of play around with Arduino, chipboard, and stuff. But then life got busy, and now I have a two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, so I pretty much get no time.

TIM: Yes, you've got bigger fish to fry, more important things to worry about than the mechanical arm. That's fair to say. One thing I really wanted to ask you about today, and I'm glad you touched on your time at Meta because you've worked in, as you've just described so eloquently, many different kinds of roles. You've worn many hats, but you've also had experience in very huge, famous companies and then more startups. And I can only imagine the hiring approach and strategy you have to take between those two environments are quite different. If so, can you lay out how they might be different?

NAVEEN: Yeah. So like you said, I've been on both sides of hiring for fast-moving startups and going through a structured FANG interview process. I think that FANG acronym needs to change now because Facebook is now Meta, right? So at companies like Meta, the process was very rigorous with multiple rounds. So I myself went through about six rounds, and then people I interviewed went through six-ish rounds as well. And then. You had the scorecard system, and then you had a consensus kind of meeting at the end of all the interviews, where everyone came together and kind of And based on that decision, it was made about whether or not to hire someone. And even if the general consensus was higher than at which level, it doesn't matter where the candidate is at the moment in their career ladder; they would, they were kind of made an offer for the job based on what the employer is offering. Six or seven people thought, Where is the sun in terms of level offer? So that was kind of unique, and I think the benefit of this kind of structured approach is that it removes the biases that come into these kinds of processes, and removing bias is important from hiring. And the second thing is it allows. For us to not have a single person making decisions because that can be dangerous as well, on the other side of the benefits of this structured approach, you know, the drawbacks, which are like the process is so rigorous that it can take from weeks to months to complete because of the availability of those five or six people who are taking these different rounds of interviews, and that can make you lose some good candidates. And that happened to me a lot, a lot of the times that we were going through the process, interviews took too long, and the candidate got other offers. So I think there are pluses and minuses to both of those, but mostly positives for the structured approach in these kinds of big companies. Startups, on the other hand, tend to move very quickly, and they value adaptability. So, for example, at a startup I worked with, they prioritized culture fit and growth mindset over ticking boxes. on a skill list, right? You cannot, you cannot teach growth mindset or, you know, change someone's behavior too much and things like that. Skills, technical skills can be taught. So getting the right person in, into the startup, is important. At the same time, while you're moving quickly, make decisions quickly. One thing I would say for anyone who's running a startup or a small business is to be able to make those difficult decisions quickly. So if you see someone not performing well, fire fast. So the hire fast and fire fast approach works well in my experience at startups. Otherwise, you can't afford to have, you know, kind of people not producing. Work at a startup. So both approaches have their merit. FANG hiring, or these big companies, hiring processes, ensure that there is consistency and structure, and then make sure that they always get the right person in with some exception every now and then. While startups can be more flexible and, you know, higher for potential rather than just the credentials. If that makes sense, yeah,

TIM: And I guess it also makes sense because a business, company, or any other enterprise has a level of risk aversion where they don't really want to risk a bad hire. They're not as flexible with how quickly they could get rid of that person as well. So it makes sense that the rigorous and then I guess a lot of candidates who are applying for those roles really want to work there. So they're willing to go through a five- or six-interview process for months. But as you said, maybe the best candidates. Have offers anyway, and they're going to drop out. It sounds like you'd experienced that. Like, how often were people dropping out of the process?

NAVEEN: It depends, in my experience. So it's very much kind of up to the motivation behind applying to this big company. So what I've seen Even personally, the view was that if I have Microsoft, Facebook, and Apple On my kind of list on my CV, that can give you an advantage to get my foot in the door into the places where I wouldn't normally be considered. You know what I mean? So a lot of the people have this patience. And, and you know that they will, they will go through this lengthy process just for the sake of getting into and getting the stamp of working at one of these companies because in the longer term that has more benefit. Whereas if someone has already kind of ticked that box, then they might not go through the whole process, or if someone is urgently looking for a role, these kinds of long structured processes might not be good for them.

TIM: And so I guess in a way it's, yeah, it's a signaling tool in a way that degrees from very prestigious universities used to be more of a thing. Now it's, yeah. Have I worked at Apple, Facebook (Meta), or Amazon, or wherever? One thing some people would say about the structured hiring process, I don't necessarily agree with them, but they would say that in the interview itself. It's so there's sometimes a sense that it's like overly structured in that the interviewer has to stick almost religiously to the script, thereby preventing. When it's done, maybe not so well preventing a candidate from actually showing them their true selves or really having an honest conversation with them because it almost becomes a little bit robotic. Did you ever have that sense? And was that a problem in your eyes?

NAVEEN: Yeah. So I, I'll, I'll share two kinds of sides of it personally. When I get interviewed and I see people just going through a bunch of questions and not having, you know, kind of a spontaneous conversation about, I'm, I'm mentioning something that I'm mentioning or asking questions about that tells me that they, they lack the, the empathy or human side of all of this. And that's not the kind of organization that I would like to work for, basically. So, while having a structured set of questions or an approach and scorecard, all of these are good things. And they, in my opinion, should be used as guiding principles, but you should also have this flexibility baked in, into the process to be able to deviate and explore the things that someone is saying, right? Because you will be able to learn a lot about someone if you kind of go out of their typical structured question a little bit. So that's from an interviewee point of view, interviewer point of view; having structure, again, it helps you many times unless you have, you know, a crazy amount of experience interviewing people. You may forget some of the things or some of the qualities that you may want to kind of touch upon and get a sense of how good someone is about. A, B, C, and D. Hence, from the interviewer's point of view, having a list helps. But again, it comes back to that, having that flexibility or buffer baked into the process and structure where you kind of allow yourself to have a free-form, free-flowing conversation with the candidate.

TIM: Yeah, absolutely. One thing I've heard anecdotally from someone who had gone through the full nine yards, the full nine interviews with a faint company recently, was they'd actually experienced the interviewers saying, You know what, I've got this list of questions I meant to ask you, but I'm not doing this. I'm just going to interview you like I would naturally and organically. And that's how we're going to do this. So it's almost like a rebellion against the structured approach, maybe because it deviated away from what the interview was actually interested in. Had you ever seen something like that yourself?

NAVEEN: I've done it myself. Even though I had a set of questions in front of me, and I made the candidate aware that, okay, I have this question to go through. I'm not going to care about it. Let's have a conversation. That kind of helped me get the candidate to be more vulnerable to me during the interview or more open to me. And that showed their true nature and behavior in a way. And by me kind of saying them, I opened up as well. Okay, I'm not going to care about these questions because I see you as human. Let's just have a chat and see. So that's it. Tactic, or an approach you can use, but at the same time, naturally, that's what I'm saying, unless someone is an experienced interviewer, most people are not; you will struggle with that kind of free-flowing conversation and natural conversation because then you need to assess someone on those criteria or the list of things you need to have the ability to bring that in as a natural conversation or be able to sense, sense, get the signals during the conversation. So yes, I've seen that, and I've done that myself, but while keeping in mind that I'm bringing all the things that I need to get signal on naturally in the conversation.

TIM: Yeah, it's such an advanced skill, I think, to be a really good interviewer. One that's maybe drastically undervalued in the sense of how much training we give people to actually interview others. I have received zero hours of training myself in my life on interviewing people, either for a podcast or for a job. And so I've just learned it by trial and error, with the emphasis maybe on error in the past. Is it a skill that everyone should learn? At least once they get to, I don't know, a senior kind of analyst level, where they're about to be involved in the hiring process. Should they be getting some training?

NAVEEN: Absolutely. I think any company that is serious about getting the right people in their organization should invest heavily in training. Individual on how to interview and all the bias and all that sort of thing. Because most of us are not interviewers. We're just, you know, either leaders or something else, whatever your role is. Interviewing is a skill, like you said, and you need to spend a lot of time learning to kind of get better at it. So, yeah, companies should invest. And if you are especially, it becomes especially critical if you are interviewing for senior leadership positions, right? Like I said, if you are a senior person, I would expect someone to have good training in interviewing skills. I'll give you a good example. So when I was interviewed at Improbable for my head of role, instead of, so an untrained interviewer might ask, Okay, what is your strength or what are your weaknesses, right? That's not a. Cool way or natural way of asking about it. Whereas my interviewer at the time asked me about, okay What do you like to do in your free time, or are you a fan of comics and things like that? Then the conversation ran in the direction. Okay. I love Marvel and DC Comics. Okay, Superman came up somehow. The interviewer was so good that he was guiding me towards all of this conversation, and he got into Superman conversation, and then, oh, Superman has these superpowers and kryptonite, which kind of kills him or kind of weakens him. So if we think about that, what are your superpowers and kryptonite? You know, instead of just asking me about my strengths and weaknesses, he asked me about my superpowers and my kryptonite. And that's a, that's a very pleasant question to kind of hear instead of strengths and weaknesses. Right. So, and you can only do that if you are a good interviewer. You either like yourself, or you have gone through several rounds of trial and error, and you learn from it, and you read books and things like that, or you get a structured training, and that's an investment companies need to make. So I hope that examples make sense. Example makes sense.

TIM: to my own conversations with people. Yeah, it's like a nice, tailored question by analogy to unlock. What is a reframing of the thing they need to understand about you? Can you remember? Actually, I'm interested. Can you remember? Did you answer that question? Transparently and honestly. Yeah.

NAVEEN: Yes, I did. So I think being authentic during, so there are two sides to it, Tim. One is if it depends on how, how secure the interviewer feels about what you're about to say. So I'll give you an example. So about the strength and kryptonite. So I. I can't remember exactly what I said, but I said something along the lines of I am a quick learner, and I can get shit done. And I am, I have this growth mindset that I'm always looking to progress in my career. And because of that, I move fast and deliver results. I'm a result-oriented person. And then a follow-up question on that was like, where do you see yourself? Like, where do you want to be? And then I said like a CTO at some point and things like that. So. Where I'm trying, what I'm trying to say is, being transparent in these kinds of conversations can also backfire, because sometimes, having a growth mindset is also not appreciated, because the interviewer might think that that person either will not stay in the role for a long time or leave the company, but that's kind of their insecurity. Like, if you build the right environment where the growth is kind of promoted and all those kinds of things, why wouldn't a person stay and thrive within the organization? So I would say, be careful about how open you are, get a sense check as an interviewee, and get a sense check of. The person who's interviewing you, how secure they are about what you're saying, which is not very easy to do in the first conversation, but that's the beauty of having multiple rounds, right? So you can, you can share these kinds of things. So, I have always been quite open and frank during these kinds of conversations, even if it came at the cost of me not getting the job, even though I was the right candidate; the feedback was great. We're looking for someone who can stay, stay in this role longer, and I probably wasn't going to stay longer. So yeah, be open, but just make sure that it doesn't backfire. Thank you.

TIM: Yes, it's funny now that you describe it that way because in the last week or so, I've been talking to people on the show about almost like radical honesty in the hiring process. And I feel like a lot of. Hiring could be improved drastically if both sides were just more open and honest much earlier on in the process so that you wouldn't get candidates getting to a final interview. Oh, you want 80,000 pounds a year? Actually, this is only 70,000. Sorry. Or, oh, you want me to work in the office twice a week? You said it was flexible working around whatever it may be. And that could come from either side of the equation, from the candidate or from the company. And I feel like. Just getting everything out on the table as soon as possible is better, but you've just given a good reframing that is not necessarily to the advantage of the candidate, to be fully honest. Or maybe you dodged a bullet for those roles that you didn't get because they didn't think you would stay long enough, or did you really want to work somewhere that didn't, that was protective over that in that way, if

NAVEEN: That tells me about a company that they don't have a great way of helping people progress in their careers. So you need to have a defined career ladder, regardless of whether you're hiring someone at whatever level. Unless in some specific scenarios, naturally someone would want to progress, either for professional growth or the financial side of things or whatever. So you need to have these defined career ladders or paths, and you must kind of proactively promote that. So where I dodged the bullet, hopefully it was for my best interest, and I kind of avoided not going into an organization that doesn't promote growth. Which is wrong. Right.

TIM: Yeah, it is. And it's such a basic question as a candidate to ask. And probably once you have enough experience, you'd appreciate it. It would be a bit of a red flag if nobody can give you an answer on that on where your career could go in that business. I feel like one thing that gets a little bit neglected when we think about how to make hiring as good as possible is the onboarding process because it's natural to think that hiring stops once you know that offer document has been signed and then, oh, that's it, hiring's done—not really, because there's a notice period. The deal isn't done until they walk in the office on day one. They could always not turn up; it just happened sometimes to me, and then Onboarding, there's a level of chaos if you haven't organized that, and a great high can slip through your fingers very quickly. How do you think about onboarding? How do you set it up? Any suggestions on how to onboard as effectively as possible?

NAVEEN: So I think onboarding plays a very critical role in, you know, getting the ball running as soon as possible. And it is especially important if you have shorter. Short probation periods, right? So if you don't have a great onboarding process or a defined structured one, then you would waste a lot of their probation, early probation time getting things set up. Which is a waste of time in terms of that, that doesn't truly assess someone's performance and capabilities. So I think having a great onboarding process is good and onboarding. People tend to think that the onboarding process starts when someone joins the organization or on day one. I think it starts several months before, as soon as the candidate has accepted the offer. And I've personally seen both sides of, you know, great and poor onboarding processes. And the difference is, it's like day and night. So I'll give you an example of a very good onboarding process. And ironically or not, it was at Meta. So onboarding started way before I joined the company. As soon as I got an offer, I got my, you know, the, the, all the electronics set up, I got all the details that I needed to kind of log in on the day one, all the contacts, and I got sent several kind of handwritten notes from recruiters to kind of welcome you, me, welcome me in the company and stuff like that. And I also had access to their internal—I forgot the name of the website. So they had the onboarding. Site dedicated to onboarding, and I had, like, details of what I will be doing without, you know, Some of the details wouldn't unlock after I joined, but I still knew what I was expected to do as soon as I joined the company, and the onboarding process was for six months. Yeah, a six-month-long onboarding process at Meta because there is so much that you need to kind of learn or know about and explore that 30 days or seven days is not enough. But, you know, at each, each month or week, I can't remember exactly now, but at every, every, let's say, few weeks, there was some milestone to kind of hit and achieve. And then you mark that as done in your onboarding website or the task list. And then you have dedicated different types of onboarding activities. You had different people assigned to help you, like, what are these called? Buddy system, if you may. And when I joined a smaller company, I, I, I personally made sure I had implemented a similar kind of onboarding process, which was very structured to kind of make sure that every hire had the best possible start.

TIM: when they join the company and experience as well. And yeah, even simple things like ensuring new hire has got all the tools set up on day one makes a huge impact in their ability to kind of integrate smoothly. So hopefully that covers the question in terms of the onboarding process. I'm trying to think of our onboarding process. I certainly learned again through trial and error, which is the best teacher in life, to add as much structure as I possibly could. When we were last hiring salespeople, I documented everything as rigorously as I possibly could. I think because also, in our first week, we typically set up these different sessions where I'd go through, I don't know, the sales strategy, the ideal customer profile, the pricing, and kind of chunk it down into individual sessions. But how much can anyone retain through just listening? So it's got to be backed up with some documented words. Is that also part of it? Having a combination of ways to get onboarded.

NAVEEN: Definitely is. And I think it's not always about how much someone can retain, but it's about exposing that new hire to everything. So there is no future where to look for the information. Right. Even though you're not retaining it based on those conversations, you will know, okay, for this, I need to go to Tim, or for this, I need to go to that person because they had that conversation early on. And one of the other things I, while you were mentioning, mentioning those goals, thought about it, it always benefits that during hiring, during onboarding, if you can set up some calls with senior and executive leadership, even though it may seem like nonimportant and a waste of time, at many times it's not because it builds that relationship and openness with the senior leadership of a candidate so that in the future, because everyone has ideas, everyone has ideas, right? And you never know where a good idea can come from. Where? So unless someone is comfortable enough to open up to their immediate manager, senior leadership, or executives, there is a very good possibility of missing out on something that can be valuable. So one thing I would, I would add to my previous answer is to ensure that you have several meetings set up with some key senior and executive leadership with every candidate.

TIM: Yeah, give them that visibility from the off. As a great shout about onboarding starting before day one, though, because that's

NAVEEN: Yeah. Yeah.

TIM: ahead of time. In fact, I can even think of a few people who've joined our company who have been so keen, they were practically more like asking me, Is there anything I can start to research and start to look into? They just wanted a snippet. I was always a little bit reticent because I didn't want to start giving them work to do when they're technically not employed. Like, I don't want to give them homework; just enjoy your few days off before you start. But maybe there were some things I could have carved out. To start things off before they even joined, the IT stuff is a good shot because why not get that set up early?

NAVEEN: So just a thought on that. I think I used to be, and I still am, that kind of person, even though I'm in head of senior roles. I still ask this question before joining, because regardless of how experienced you are, you will always, I think, feel that imposter syndrome. Right. Like whichever job you will go for. It's a normal human tendency that. You're not good enough for this role, or you accidentally got it at this imposter syndrome that's going on in your head. So when I ask for information upfront, it's not like I'm asking for work, but if they tell me that, okay, this is the tech we use, or we use agile, or extreme agile, or whatever else, then I can brush up and read more about it so that when I join. I, I, I'm a little bit more confident about the processes or the technology and things like that, so I have benefited previously when someone shared the list of this. But it also depends on what the candidate asks. If a candidate asks for a vague question like, Is there anything I should know before joining? then you get a vague answer or your kind of reservation, right? Right. You don't want to give them, give them work. But if you ask targeted questions, like, Okay, gimme the tech; I want to brush up on my skills or the process and what kind of things we. What kind of processes are we using, or what methodology are we using, then, then, then that can benefit the candidate? And not having imposter syndrome and being confident at work, I think, can help with a lot of other things, productivity, and all sorts of things.

TIM: Yeah, that's a great shot. And yeah, that would be why I haven't started a new job for a long time. That would certainly reduce my kind of anxiety just to get a little bit of an insight. Another one actually is more around the people. I guess as part of a hiring process, you get to meet several people, which is nice. What about just, I don't know, meeting for a coffee before the job starts? Would you ever want to do that as a candidate or hiring manager?

NAVEEN: That's a good, good question. Now I have done it personally before, but I met a CTO and an engineering leader because we were both in the same city. We were, we were all part of the same meetups and things like that. So it kind of made it a little bit easier and more natural for us to sit down for a coffee and talk about things. But I think with this whole remote culture, I don't know how How feasible is that, other than having a virtual coffee and stuff? But I guess it can add value to the conversation. I haven't personally done it with my hires. Something for me to think about

TIM: Yeah. Virtual coffee is not quite as enjoyable as one in real life. It's fair to say. One thing you touched on earlier, which was one of the benefits of the really rigorously structured hiring approach that Meta and other such companies have, is that it helps to make that hiring accurate. You know what you're going to get because it's almost like a hiring machine by the sounds of it. Like, it's pretty well defined. So at least it's—or maybe you're going to tell me it's not—the outcome reasonably accurate and predictable?

NAVEEN: Reasonably, yes, not always though, because in Metta, without saying any names, I have seen people, you know, get in who were not even capable of that level. So if I were to interview them, I would rank them two or three levels below what they were in. Now, that is because of the whole referral system. So I think one of the cracks in this whole structured approach is the referral system. So at Meta, Microsoft, and Apple. I have been interviewed at all three, so I have experience with these three. That if you are referred to these, it's almost certain that you will get a call from a recruiter, and once you get that, whoever is referred to you and if they're your friends. And they can, you know, kind of train you. And, and I, I learned that this person came in, in that way, even though they weren't at, so they weren't at the level that they were brought in, let's say level three or five, and they were at level one, but this person who referred them kind of fed them information about how to answer and what metrics to kind of mention during the interview. So that, that. In the scorecard, you get the points. So, it's not completely safe, the whole structured approach. That's why having a free-form conversation can really help in these kinds of situations, because one can prepare on these different aspects. But you can then throw a, throw a, throw a, what's the, what's the analogy,

TIM: Curveball.

NAVEEN: Curveball. at them to actually sense. So I always, I always ask some surprising questions during the interview that are not even on the list. And that tells me a lot more about the candidate than all the questions would.

TIM: Yeah, if you get a really perplexed, sorry, an annoyed, annoyed-looking candidate, Oh, how can you ask me that? That's not on the list that I was given. How dare you? Naveen, what's going on? Then that's when you know they've been cheating a little bit.

NAVEEN: Yeah. Yeah. But there are obvious benefits, like I mentioned before. So it helps with reducing bias to a certain extent.

TIM: Yes. And that is what I'd like to pick up on the bias because I feel like traditional recruitment processes are pretty rife with bias. I feel like having a structured process removes it, sorry, partially removes it without fully removing it. At least because you have this consistent set of questions, candidates are evaluated in a similar way. It's not just this purely intuitive, do I like them? What I call vibe hiring is common in maybe more immature hiring companies, but in general, apart from, let's say, having a structured approach, are there any other ways that we can make hiring a bit more objective, a bit more fair, a bit less biased?

NAVEEN: I think having structure is definitely one way of doing it. Second one, I would say, and when I was working at ASOS and improbable, there were trainings available and, and interviewers were required to go on these trainings on different types of bias, biasness. I think the problem is people know generally, okay, we shouldn't be biased during interviews, but they don't know there are like tens of types of bias. So one structured approach can help reduce bias and make the whole system fairer, a little bit. Second is send your. Interviewers on training on biasness. So they are aware of different types of bias. And one thing you slightly touched upon as well, and I would like to kind of give a different kind of wording to it, is the halo and horn effect. Right. So, so you meet someone, and someone is very jolly and things like that, and you're that kind of person as well. So you're kind of vibing, like you said, so you get this halo effect in the beginning, and that would unconsciously make you kind of discard some of the warning signs that you may be getting from that person. So understanding our biases makes keeping a very close eye on this halo and horn effect. I think that that can be true regardless of whether you're interviewing someone or generally meeting someone and all those kinds of scenarios and situations. And involving more than one person in the whole interview process can also help because other people might have a different point of view on someone's abilities and, you know, qualities and things like that.

TIM: Yeah, the halo effect is so real. Who wouldn't look at a CV and see it says education, PhD in physics from Oxford, and think they're probably pretty clever, which they are? I'm sure, but that doesn't mean that they're the right candidate for the role. I can tell you from my own experience in trying to hire a product analyst; this was years ago now. We had a lunchtime indoor soccer team at our local university that was near where our office was. And each semester we came devastatingly close to winning. the championship, we lost the grand final, I think, five semesters in a row. And so we were just on the lookout for one extra good player to get us across the line. And I remember going through hundreds of these CVs for this product analyst role and seeing one guy went down the hobby section of his CV; it said he was a semi-professional footballer in Brazil. And so I was like, Oh, perfect. Okay, great. And I remember standing up to my colleague next to me, who was also in the team. I was like, Oh, look at this guy. I can't remember what his name was. Let's get him in for an interview. We did. We got him in for an interview. At least partly because he was a semi-professional footballer in Brazil. Now I don't know if there's any correlation between juggling a football and doing an AB test. Maybe there is, but his, yeah, his footballing ability was pretty irrelevant for his user behavior analytics. And that's pretty unfair because I elevated him above everyone else who didn't play football. And so yeah, there's got to be some way we could start to. Remove some of this stuff from even entering the process? Should we even be seeing someone's hobby? Should we be seeing their name in the screening stage? What do you think?

NAVEEN: I'm kind of divided on that. If you have the right process in place, including how you train the interviewers, then hiding names and hobbies doesn't make much difference. But at the same time, I think that hiding can be helpful because of unconscious bias. Like you just gave an example of a football player or a salsa dancer or whatever it can be. Or another very common one is they went to the same university as I did. That's another one. Or same city, or same country, or whatever else. These unconsciously kind of make you biased. You don't even know about it. So hiring these can help. So I wouldn't give a definitive answer on that because I, myself, am divided, and it depends on, you know, what kind of, how, how mature your hiring process or interview process is. But one thing I would say is nowadays, with the use of AI, I think you can eliminate a lot of these things and, and, and introduce more fairness into the system.

TIM: Yeah, 100 percent. I feel like there's so much upside in using AI in hiring. And maybe we're right to have some fears around AI and the issues it can cause. But I feel like in hiring, the status quo is so poor that surely we could only improve it, but maybe I'm being overly optimistic. What's your overall thoughts on how AI could R?

NAVEEN: I think it can positively impact the hiring process, at least. First few stages, right? And maybe, maybe after as well. I'll tell you why. Because, as part of my previous roles, I had to go through hundreds of CVs at a time. And having the AI tool kind of helped me shift through all of these, and quickly flagging relevant and irrelevant candidates really helped. And, of course, you need to kind of verify by taking some examples that it's doing the right job and feed it back, basically, and it depends on what kind of tool you're using. But in general, at that stage where you're kind of filtering candidates, AI can be a great help. And that's where you get, you know, this, Oh, I went to the same university, same country, whatever kind of bias, completely eliminated. Yeah, I won't care about it. So I think introducing at that stage is extremely helpful, both for, you know, increasing the rate at which you kind of go through the CVs or applications and to reduce biases. The second one I would say is during interviews, if you don't use AI tools, who takes notes for you or records the conversation and then summarizes it at the same time? Keep the whole conversation for reference. Then you are left with taking notes by yourself, which had been the case before AI, right? And because of these biases and stuff, even though the candidate is saying something, we are writing something else. I don't know if you can relate to that. So, when you ask a question of a candidate, they're saying something, but we are writing something else in terms of our notes and stuff, whereas using AI tools like one of my favorites, MetaView. It's AI-powered interview note-taking. So it joins the conversation, it takes all the notes, and then you can ask all the questions. So it kind of reduces all of this. Best interpretation or translation of what the candidate said and what I wrote. Make sense? So,

TIM: Absolutely. And it's such a no-brainer because interviewing, as we were saying before, is a high-skill task. It's hard enough. The last thing you want to be doing is writing notes and focusing on their body language and thinking what question to ask next and really trying to understand them as a human being. That's cognitively difficult. I'm not sure I can do all of those things at the same time competently. So yeah, why not let the AI take notes? Take notes for you, record the recording, do the transcript, the summary, everything. It seems like a no-brainer to me. You also mentioned AI CV screening. It sounds like you've already dabbled with this yourself; is that right?

NAVEEN: Yeah, yeah. So I use tools like LinkedIn Hiring Assistant, which uses AI as well. And then RecruiterNow, HireVue, and MetaView. So at different companies, I kind of played around or used one of these tools. MetaView so far is the best one. Which added a lot of value to my whole interview process.

TIM: And so that was doing the CV.

NAVEEN: The notes. No, not screening. It was taking the notes, basically. Yeah. For screening, mainly LinkedIn Hiring Assistant.

TIM: Okay, and so for that feature. They help highlight the most relevant applications based on certain criteria. Is that how it works?

NAVEEN: Yeah, yeah. Which kind of matches your application with the job requirements.

TIM: Yeah, I feel like those tools being used on mass are surely only just around the corner, because if every company is getting inundated with hundreds or even thousands of applications, companies are going to have to battle AI with AI.

NAVEEN: Yeah.

TIM: Do you think?

NAVEEN: I think it's true in To a certain extent, but what we haven't touched upon is that it's not just about companies or interviewers using AI; it's the candidates using AI that is a big problem at the moment. I'm not sure if you came across this, but there was this, I don't know, interview GPT or some bot someone built that was AI-powered, which applied for like thousands of jobs for you on your behalf overnight in one night, like thousands of jobs. And the guy got like 15 interviews at the end of it. So how do you tackle that? I don't know the answer to that because these AI-powered boards nowadays can look at the job description, create a brand new CV for you based on that job description and cover letter, and all other things posted on your behalf. So I think it's an area that is evolving, and we'll learn as we go. But there are two sides to things: the candidates using AI and the companies that aim to be using it. Yeah.

TIM: Yes. And my perception so far is that maybe because candidates are individuals, they've picked up the AI very quickly; they were super early adopters, whereas it's naturally going to take any company a little bit longer to adopt a new tool. The software using the AI has to be built anyway, so it's like a little bit of a lag with the HR tech coming out, so maybe we're in this weird in-between state where candidates are using it, but companies aren't quite yet, and then we'll get to a new equilibrium.

NAVEEN: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And like you rightly said, companies are generally, even still, I think, based on a few, several conversations I had over the last year with different senior leaders, they're still very, they're still in, the word I'm, I think, denial; they're still in denial of AI. They still think it's just one of those things that will come and go, but I don't. That's not the case. It's here to stay, unless you kind of adopt it and leverage it or embed it in your business and organization, you will be, if I were to use an analogy, a dinosaur, like extinct, after a certain time. So, yeah, I think at the moment. Now that you said it, candidates have got the upper edge with the AI part as compared to companies because these tools that I mentioned are not cheap as well. So the enterprise plans cost money, and not every company's HR department has got a budget to leverage these kinds of tools. But what they don't think is that not using it is also expensive and costs them money. So

TIM: Yes.

NAVEEN: Something to think about.

TIM: Yes. It's always easy to calculate the cost of software, but harder to calculate the opportunity cost of missing out on the candidates or the inaccurate selection process or whatever. Naveen, if you could ask our next guest any question about hiring, what would you choose to ask them?

NAVEEN: Let me think, yeah, I would say, what is the most surprising lesson you have learned about hiring that changed your approach drastically? So,

TIM: That's a great question. I love that because that's going to bring up some really great anecdotes. See also who changes their mind based on new data, because that's not always easy to do. It's always easy to be stuck in your way and think you know everything. But I would love to have my worldview smashed every now and then. I really enjoy that. I find that a

NAVEEN: Me.

TIM: I'd be interested to hear what the next guest tells us about that. Naveen, it's been a great conversation today. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing.

NAVEEN: Yeah. Likewise, Tim, thank you so much for having me on the podcast.