Episode 14

Ebrahim Bakhtar on the Complexities of Fair Hiring Practices

TIM: Ebrahim, when you think about hiring at the moment, what are your biggest challenges?

EBRAHIM: The hardest thing about being in a marketing analytics agency or marketing analytics team is trying to find that preexisting skill set because it is still relatively niche, so there's two ends of the problem: either we're trying to hire someone with experience into a senior position or a managerial position. And it is, I think, there are a few unicorns out there who have been around the block through different agencies, and they've got the skill set, and there's a real breadth to the skill set that we need where they've got the technical skills, but they've also got the ability to handle multiple clients. They know how to juggle stakeholders internally and externally, as well as a real breadth of technical knowledge across implementation stuff, so finding people with that skill set Is really, really hard, and attracting them to a different agency, you've got to give them a reason to move, like why is this agency or this sort of agency team going to be better than ones they've been in in the past? And I do genuinely believe we are one of the better ones to work for, but that's not easy to communicate because everyone can just say that. So you've got to use authentic examples to get them to talk to the team and stuff, but on LinkedIn that doesn't really come across on your ad post, so yeah, finding that specific skill set, the breadth of it, as well as the depth of the technical knowledge, and then when it comes to hiring juniors, it's spotting potential, I think, and that's, you know, I'm sure ubiquitous for all kinds of data roles. But it takes a special sort of person to really enjoy working in an agency for better or worse, and I think spotting the characteristics of someone who's going to have, like, real dedication to the detail of what they do take extreme pride in everything that they output as a kind of representation of both themselves and the wider business but also be really interested in a sort of very technical role on top of it, and I think finding the combination of those two things is still relatively rare. but we've been very lucky in the past couple of years that we've managed to find a few of them, and they're doing really well.

TIM: So you've laid out quite different challenges for the more senior versus a more junior end of the spectrum. Does that then feed through into how you hire those different roles? Is the process different? Are you searching in different places? How does the process vary?

EBRAHIM: Yeah, it does vary a lot, so for experienced candidates we tend to give a task, so it'll be an old client, actually the first client I worked on when I joined Rocket Mill, now PMG, so we'll give them kind of the brief and then say, Look, This type of company is looking to do a new big campaign. Here's their website. tell us end to end How are you going to set up a tracking measurement framework? How are you going to report? How are you going to help business decisions? And we let them really flex all of their muscles, so we give them a chance to go as broad as they're able because a candidate might talk about, like, really specific implementation best practices that they've done, where it's, I'm going to set up server-side, and I'm going to use this form of cookie list tracking and do really cool stuff to stitch identities and dah. But then they can also go into, Here's how I'm going to make the dashboard really good for the different stakeholders, and we're going to run this workshop, and that gives them a chance. We try to make it specific enough a task so we're not just leaving some nebulous thing to respond to. So there is a relatively specific brief, but the way they handle it shows their own strategic thinking. They can show us what they're best at through that. That's like our major process for experienced hires, where we expect them to be able to draw an experience and talk about what they've done in the past. But for juniors, that would be totally unfair to give them a task. Because they've not worked in it Yeah, I don't really expect them to know what Google Tag Manager is or what pixels are and stuff like that. It doesn't matter. Yet what matters is that it's all potential; it's all, I suppose, two things. It's hard skills potential, and then it's like character. and again it's like looking for that person who's going to thrive here, not just do the job but have a nice time. get to meet loads of new friends throughout the business, not just be in the analytics team but get to know everyone in the agency and, like, really thrive in the environment. That is really hard to quantify that one, so we're yet to come up with a written exam that totally nails all of that in one, but what we do is there's a relatively new process that we introduced a year or so ago, which consists of post-CV review; we'll pick the top 10 or 20 and have a conversation with two people. So two analysts from the team, one senior and one more junior, and it'll be a Give us your life story. How have you stumbled across this job? Do you have any idea what it is? It's okay if not, but what about the job spec made you interested? Can I just get into the meat of what the intention is, what the goal is for them? and that's so hard when you're a graduate; like, you really don't know, and I think we've designed the process with a kind of sympathy for that because it's still pretty fresh in my memory graduating and really not having a foggy idea what you're trying to do, but you're vaguely trying to start a career. So I think we're like trying to funnel the right people through that and then qualify if this is going to give them big benefits in terms of their long-term career, and if that chat goes well, there's no really quantifiable metrics we're using there; it is a little bit based on a subjective choice, a decision made by the examiners. Does this person sound like they would do Are they someone who's got the capability to be data-driven? Do they have attention to detail? Have they got hobbies that have shown that they're going to do well? And that's a big one, I think, because obviously you look at a degree if they've got one, you look at school, you look at grades, and in analytics there is still a need to be discriminatory in terms of is there some math. in the history there because that's going to come up ideally. I like some science, but I'm a little bit biased coming from a science background myself, but I think it really lends itself to that idea of using data to make decisions and statistical rigor and all that stuff, so science is always a boost but not mandatory, but some kind of critical thinking subjects Or help a baseline, and then it's what kind of hobbies do they have? How do they enjoy their free time? Are they someone who does a very aspirational hobby where it's all about kind of improvement and dedication, or do they have a hobby that is like very creative, and there's a different kind of output, and they're able to think laterally and come up with other stuff? So it doesn't really matter, but I think having something like that goes a long way for me, and it feels okay. This is someone who's rounding themselves out, and they're figuring out who they want to be, and they're exploring life. To not get too philosophical, but yeah, we like to see that. So that's nice, so a long answer to a short question. Tim, beyond that stage, we then do a math exam. I know that's horrible of me to do that to people, but we do again need to enforce some level of math. It's like GCSE level, which in England is like high school, so it's not too crazy, but it's something that we like. If you can't do this or, like, most of this, you might struggle kind of thing. So we're trying to just avoid people having a bad time basically, and then the final interview is a really informal chat with someone else on the team, so this is where we get a chance to bring in maybe someone more junior who's been there like a year or two who can also have a very candid conversation with them, and we want them to qualify us as much as we qualify them. so they can, they're alone; they're having a private conversation. Managers don't hear what's said, and they get to be really honest with each other, and like, How's your first year been? and we're so confident that we provide a good environment, but I'm actually happy for our most recent grads to have that conversation in an honest environment because I'm confident that what they're going to have to say has been good. and I want them to get an honest view on what it's like to be in this team, and I think that's really important where we get the character stuff really qualified in, and we get to find out if they are going to enjoy what it sounds like. From the people who've most recently gone through that process, the final step is a conversation with the CEO, which is like a kind of long-standing tradition from Rocket Mill that we've still brought forward. So that is again like zero technical stuff coming up in that conversation. It's all about who you are, what your hobbies are, what you do, and are you going to vibe with this team basically.

TIM: You mentioned in passing that, okay, you didn't necessarily measure anything in those early stages of the process, but then you also outlined a set of criteria that really you were looking for. Which, to me, sounds like you could be measuring stuff because you have subjective criteria in an interview, and then you're almost doing a yes/no or a scale of one to five when you do the interviews. Do you try to have that evaluation matrix, or is it like a pass/fail at the end of the interview, or is it some kind of notes and a bit of a feel? How do you, yeah, how do you go about grading them?

EBRAHIM: Yeah, no, you are right; we do have a set of criteria. It's like just a big sheet where we have broadly the topics that we want to go through in the conversation, and we just encourage interviewers to write some notes so we don't give a quantitative score. Necessarily for each section, but there is a good, bad feeling off the back of each, so it's, you know, Do you have any kind of analytical experience in your past? It's in my degree I did this, or it's not really because I've never really touched data ever before, but I'm interested in it. That might be a bit more of them; they've not shown any kind of chops yet, so yeah, there is a not measured, and it's not quantified, but it is measured in a loose way. But I think you have to allow a certain level of subjectivity when it comes to conversations with people, so obviously the math exam number 17 out of 20 is my favorite bit because it's really easy to make a decision on it, but the rest of it is just providing some kind of framework. That's like at least the same across all the interviews so that there's some consistency in what we're looking for, but it will vary, and I think that's a kind of interesting segue into making hiring more fair and more objective because it is such a subjective thing, these conversations and these kind of different themes you want to touch on. It was this good or bad, and different people might think differently of that, and also they can be viewed through different cultural lenses, and different backgrounds might skew the way that you perceive someone's answers, so I think it's a really hard challenge to make hiring fair realistically. like I've got a set of biases I mentioned one earlier. I like science; if someone's got a biomedical science background, I'll be like, Oh my god, like, that'll be exciting for me, and then that's not necessarily a good thing because I might end up biasing towards a candidate who's actually not as good as someone from like a background in like history or fine art or something like that who actually has like loads of potential, so I think you try your best to be aware of your biases, but realistically you can't really get rid of them as such, or at least I've not yet found a reliable way of convincingly doing that. So the best solution I've yet to come up with is just trying to make the hiring team as diverse as possible so that the people who are considering the candidates have as many different perspectives as you can get, so sex, gender, race, cultural background, economic background, and you know all of this stuff. Provides a different lens on the world And I think it's really important to, as much as you can, and you've only got the people you've got, which I think is the biggest challenge, is you might not necessarily have every perspective that you ideally want because you'd want to get every perspective you could on every candidate, but that's just a resource-limiting challenge. You realistically can't So you do the best you can with the three or four people who are going to be in each hiring process, and you just try to make sure that they're not all very aligned with the way they think. You know, some healthy disagreements in the hiring team, I think, are really important, and this is where I tend to leverage also maybe some of our more junior members. Like, as we've moved out of Brighton and into London and the rest of the country, we've got way more diversity in terms of backgrounds and ways of thinking. and that in that kind of enables us to have more perspectives on what good is and what someone might be, so drawing from not just the management level but also the more junior level and saying, Can you go have a chat with this person? How do you feel? How did you connect? Do you think they'd be a good fit for that kind of stuff? I think it's been really valuable and giving me an extra perspective to draw on

TIM: Thank you for that extensive description. One thing I've noticed when you expand the number of people involved in the hiring process, as you've mentioned, is that getting a diverse set of views from different people can sometimes derail if they're not all on the same page in terms of what you're looking for. So if it's just someone who's come in and gone, you've got 10 minutes to have a chat with this person. I got about a data analyst, real cool. They'll have their view of what a data analyst should be and what they shouldn't be as opposed to, Okay, here's the 10 things we're looking for. Let's not forget this. Set up the whole process to look for these 10 things. Have you encountered that almost like trade-off between diversity of opinion versus staying on the same page, or is it just solvable by making sure everyone knows what the brief is?

EBRAHIM: Such a valid point. I can definitely see it getting muddier if you and this poor candidate have got to have how many interviews with you, and you don't want to be like, Okay, now meet this person; now meet this person, so there is definitely like a point of diminishing returns. I think you're now adding more noise and less signal, but from the way we've run it with that kind of process I outlined for you before it was like two people: a hard skills test, a presentation, and then the kind of other person in the team, because we're only adding one other person in, and although that is a relatively unguided conversation where we're talking about your experience, getting to know them a little bit, trying to talk about not work a little bit, and it's, I suppose, we're trying to use it as a bit of a shortcut, a bit of a heuristic for does this person fit into the culture of the team, so for me, as the hiring managers who are ultimately making the decision, it's just another data point to use. It's does this heuristic of them getting along with this other person in the team who is a different type of person to me? Do they get along well? I can give a really bad example of this one where it actually completely disqualified someone from the process where we were hiring for the graduate role, so it was junior, and then we had the in-person interview day where all of the candidates came in. We didn't have loads; we had about five, and then they did the math test. They did a short presentation in groups, and then they had the informal chats, and most of the candidates were just like, Fine, they got on well with the rest of the team. But then one candidate seemed to really struggle when talking to other women in the room, and there was a sort of feeling of like maybe awkwardness. You don't want to go as far as to say anything like sexism because that's like a huge assumption to make, but it felt a bit not great to me and like to the rest of the team. And it was like when everyone was leaving and saying bye, we were shaking hands and everything. and this person, like, didn't shake any of the women's hands and just walked out. Chalk that up maybe to nerves on the day, but it was noticeable there was a difference in behavior towards the guys in the room and the women in the room, and that was a great example of having a bit of diversity in the team in the room. Let us spot a behavior that's okay. Is this person going to make some people feel a little bit less than or uncomfortable?

TIM: A great example, and it's so interesting how I find in hiring you can set up the most structured process you want, and you can think of everything you're looking for ahead of time, but then it's sometimes like the little things along the way where a candidate might do something that just shows you a side that you really would rather not have seen.

EBRAHIM: Yeah.

TIM: And back in, yeah, like face-to-face interview times, you might get feedback from the person on reception and how they interact with them. Even though they went interviewing with them, did they still treat them with the same level of respect as everywhere else? If I think about now, a few people in the way they run their technical assessments is they would sometimes almost have a meta test. Almost like test zero would be, can you figure out how to open this file? It's not even part of the test; it's just like almost these entry points or giving them a chance to present a red flag. Can you just bash through problem number one or not? And this is the social equivalent of that. Can they not put their foot in it or mistreat people in some way?

EBRAHIM: Yeah, exactly, exactly. The conduct around the interview can be just as useful as the interview, right?

TIM: I wonder if you have anything to say about the equivalent thing, but once the canvas started, like I started noticing once we were hiring a lot of people, thinking about what the early warning signs are and what people are doing on day one, week one, that then maps to, Oh God, like on week eight, I'm like, this person needs to go. and we started thinking about some of these little things, real basics, like turning up on time. Could they connect to the call properly? Did that microphone and camera work? Just absolute, what seemed like basics, that would be very hard to think of ahead of time, but then once you see enough people doing it, you're like, Oh, okay, this is not going to work out well for you. Have you encountered anything like that?

EBRAHIM: Yeah, I think people do sometimes maybe relax and show their true selves after the fact, and you definitely got to watch it. And I think one of the things that we discussed previously was that your interview process is like doing your best to get to know someone and having a guess that this is who they are, but it does extend into the first three to six months of the job, and it takes a long time to really get to know who someone is and how they're going to operate and who they really are. and people can really put on a clean face during the interview process. It's just like dating; the first few dates, they can be Mr. Stand-Up Guy, and then who knows what's really going on with their political agendas behind the scenes? You know, it is a case of, I think, continuing that interview process in your mind in those first few months and being like, Still trying to get to know them, and don't relax and just be like, Okay, we're hiring them; it's done," and I think, you know, continue to make that effort to get to know them as a person because, A, you're hopefully going to work with this person for a long time. So why wouldn't you take an interest in them and try to get to know them and form a good professional relationship? And b) You want to protect yourself from having made a bad hire while you've still got that probation protection. You don't want to find out. After the fact that actually this person's been derogatory towards other colleagues, or maybe they've been a little bit unfriendly, or they're just bad at the job As you say, not turning up on time and these kinds of You know, just like housekeeping-type stuff where actually they're just a bit of a bum and, like, they're not really doing what you need them to do.

TIM: Yes, it's almost as if we should view the hiring process as not stopping at the point at which they sign the contract but maybe at the end of the probation period or the end of the first year or something like that. If I think of a few companies I've spoken to recently, some had very clear milestones; they were checking in with this candidate every two weeks until month three, so they're expecting the candidate to climb towards passing that probation period. If I think about some of my hiring mistakes, I probably got them in and said, Here you go. You get on with it, and time passes very quickly, and before you know it, the probation is over, and you think, Oh, they probably shouldn't be here anymore.

EBRAHIM: and that's a really hard situation to handle, and I think one of the other Your signals are really useful; obviously, like we've mentioned some extremes, but 99 percent of the time I'm sure you're not going to come up against anything that obvious. Hopefully, but one other signal is like not hearing much, and I think that can be a pretty good sign that this person isn't really integrating because if I think about my best hires over the past couple of years, and not to brag, but we've done really well with a couple of really good analytics managers who've come in and absolutely smashed it. Every account that they've gone on feedback from the client leadership team, the client services team has been like, Wow, this new guy's great. James is amazing. Lawrence is amazing. That's a shout-out to James and Lawrence, the really unprovoked. I haven't even asked the question. It's just come to me that this person is doing well. They're taking ownership; they're taking the initiative, and if you're not hearing anything like that, it could be a cultural thing. Maybe your company's not one for giving positive feedback. Fine. Ask the question you should be hopefully getting some of that stuff in because your first three months you really want to make a good impression, right? So this is hopefully the hardest kind of effort you'll see from them, or you'll see them operating at max capacity. Let's put it like that. So if you're not hearing any positive feedback about them throughout the business, that's a sign to ask questions, I think.

TIM: That's a great insight because, as you say, that feedback's coming unprompted. and what I also like about that is it's not really until you've had a great hire that you understand sometimes the benchmark, and I noticed this also with interviewing: you might have 10 or 15 interviews, and you ask the questions, and you think, That's a pretty good answer. That's a 10. It's pretty good. Are these questions harder than I thought they were? But then along will come the great candidate who'll go bang! Annihilate it and make it look easy. Oh! That's what we're looking for; that's what we need, and I wonder if it's the same once they join and you start to get that feedback, as you say, from the stakeholders.

EBRAHIM: Yeah, exactly like exactly that. You don't know what good looks like until you see it, so it does make a huge difference, and we can all resonate with that process where it's like interviewing, and no one's crashing and burning, but no one's really blowing you away. and you're okay; everyone's fine, and it's really hard to make a decision on it. It's a bunch of fine or good, and then, yeah, hopefully you get that one person who comes and shows you how it's done.

TIM: It's the proverbial six out of the park, yeah, whatever, out of the cricket ground. What about this? So we've spoken about some outlier candidates who were exceptionally unusual in not necessarily a good way, but they're not the typical. But why are we, let's say, splitting between the junior roles you hire for and the more senior ones? Is there a pattern that's generally separating the successful from the unsuccessful or common reasons why candidates would fall down?

EBRAHIM: Yeah, it's such an interesting question, and I guess if you can really crack that, then you can solve hiring forever. If you could find the one thing that everyone has in common, I don't think there is one thing in common, but what I do tend to see is, yeah, across both levels of hiring, the people who are a bit more sociable in the interview process—not necessarily extroverted; they don't have to be, like, cracking jokes or super loud or super animated, but sociable as in they're really engaging. They also want to get to know you as an interviewer. They're interested in your culture and your team. And asking the right kind of questions, I think it comes down to that kind of engagement with the job because there's a difference between I'm a candidate who just needs to get a job versus I'm a candidate who wants to get the right job, and I'm making sure that you're the right place for me. and I think there is a level of, as a grad, that's harder to feel that way, but I would encourage all grads to think that way as well because you have value you're bringing, and you want to make sure that you're going to the right place as well, not just getting any old post but maybe sometimes that's fine for the first one. and then it's the second one you can be a little bit more picky, so yeah, I think it's that kind of engagement with you as the interviewer and you as the business and being like, Okay, What does it feel like to work here? How clear are you with expectations? Where do you fall down as a manager? What's the biggest weakness in your team? Here are some write these down, guys. These are good ones that impress me as a manager. If you could change one thing tomorrow about the way that your business runs, What would it be like, stuff like that, where you're probing just like the interviewer is doing to you, right? You probe back, and I think everyone as an interviewer appreciates that and finds it really interesting if you can get your interviewer to go Huh, that's a really good question. That's like the best thing you can do, I think.

TIM: thinking along similar lines I know when we do hiring, I would have many interviews in the same day. I might have five, six, seven, or eight interviews. If I haven't taken incredible notes, frankly, I'm going to forget the first person that day. Something as simple as anything you can do to stand out in a positive way as you said, really engaging questions, especially those at junior levels, where it's very easy for you to fall in amongst a sea of candidates because the grad cohorts are so large, anything you can do surely is to your benefit, I think.

EBRAHIM: Definitely, yeah, you're definitely standing out either through some insane anecdotes, some really interesting hobbies, or some really good questions. I think one of the funniest hobbies that we heard, complete side note, was we were interviewing one of the managers who's now in the team. and it was me and the head of analytics interviewing this person, and we had a really good hour-long interview. We went into all the technical details and stuff, and then Neil, the head of analytics, says, We've got any hobbies? and this person says, Oh, you're like, Yeah, I'm into Dungeons and Dragons. and I DM and stuff, and I was like, Cool, pretty standard for analytics, and then also into mycology, and I was like, Is that like mushrooms and stuff? and he was like, Yeah, no follow-up questions, and Neil didn't ask anything after that, and I was like, Hold on, I've got loads of questions about what does that mean. So that stood out a little bit, and we definitely remembered that.

TIM: Okay, should I probe more? Is this all above board? Are they doing experiments? Is it a sort of Breaking Bad scenario?

EBRAHIM: Yeah, then the number one thing they now immediately follow up with is, No, it's not magic mushrooms; it's not psilocybin. It's just about finding it's like bird spotting for mushrooms. I think that would be a good description.

TIM: Oh wow, do they actually pick them as well to study them or eat them? I guess some of them might be poisonous, or they're just observing them as an interesting

EBRAHIM: I think just observing them, like taking photos they sent through, cause now it's autumn, they sent through a bunch of photos of really pretty mushrooms, so I get it now having seen some really cool-looking mushrooms. I'm like, Oh yeah, that is pretty cool, actually.

TIM: Changing the topic away from mushrooms, be it magic or otherwise, can you think of Any particular time you were hiring and things went awry, do you have a top one hiring fail that comes to mind?

EBRAHIM: Yeah, unfortunately I do. You can't always get it right, and I think we've had situations where people haven't passed probation, which is you really do feel like you've failed in that instance and you've let this person down because it's your job to make sure that they're going to be the right fit. But as we discussed, it's really hard to totally know if someone is going to have success in joining your team. I think the biggest challenge, or the one that I think was the biggest flop on our side, is we were hiring for a managerial position where the team was like super stretched, and we were all covering more than we should be. So we were like desperate for someone to come in and hit the ground running with experience and know exactly what they're doing. So we went through the hiring process; we did everything around, like, the presentation, and this candidate came in and said all the right things and delivered a good presentation that kind of seemed to tick the boxes. But then when they actually came into the business, they just didn't have that technical experience that we thought they did, so when I was like, Okay, cool, welcome, really glad you're here, chill out for week one, week two, can you do this task?" it was like a pretty bread-and-butter thing. and they were like, No, I'm not really sure how to do that, and that was immediate; that was like the start of the nightmare. It was like immediately a red flag flew up, and I was like, Oh, okay, all right, I guess I'll do that, and then it was a really tricky few months where I—and this was early on in my career as a manager, so I think what every new manager then does is they go, We're going to get them up to scratch; we're going to fill in two years of skill gaps because I'm not giving up on this person, and you get to know this person, and you like them on a personal level, and you don't want to see them fail. You don't want to fail, so you refuse to accept the idea that actually you just made a misfire mishire. You misfired with a hire, and realistically they're not going to really make the grade. It was three months of me picking up their work, so it just added an extra load on me as I was then also trying to get them up to scratch. and I was like, okay, do this online tutorial and then go and get this qualification and go and learn this and that. But they really didn't have the skill set nor really the drive to pick up the gap; they weren't really trying to meet us in the middle. There was a kind of level of, I'm here now. And yeah, I think we, I think in month two, around that time, we just had to let that one go, which was definitely the right choice, and I remember the chief operational officer saying to me, Usually people don't come back from that situation, and when someone's on a pip, it's very hard to get them off one and become a really valuable member of the team. So I think there was a little bit of a learning curve; if the flag is that big and red on day one, it's unlikely that they're going to become a really valued member of the team later down the line.

TIM: Yeah, that's a great share. It reminded me of a similar story I've heard recently but with a slightly happier ending where a candidate had claimed in the hiring process to be a SQL expert. This is for a data analyst role, I think, and they didn't really validate that in the process at all. They were some high-level interview questions, but no tests or anything like that. Canada came in on day one, and I don't know SQL. I just completely lied, so now we're going to solve this problem together. Now, of course, the hiring manager is pretty annoying because it's just a flagrant lie. It's not like a slight misrepresentation, but to this guy's credit, he had the kind of gumption and get-up where basically he said, I'm just backing myself. I'm going to get this job. I know I don't know SQL, but I know I can learn it quickly. So it's where he had, in a sense, the right mindset, even if it's misled and lied a bit to get the job. He actually managed to learn SQL quickly, and he's still in the company now. He's managed to excel, so I think that's definitely a rare case. And you're right if you have the combination of the lack of skill and the lack of effort when you're the one You practically pushing this person to upskill, yeah, that's a bridge too far.

EBRAHIM: It's not to say that people can't ever come back from the pip, and I was very glad to be wrong in another instance where we hired this person. They had some technical skills, but they were really struggling with some of the stuff that I maybe would have expected them to like nail out of the gate. and I was thinking, okay, this person's probably not got what we need; they've not necessarily got the chops, but I'm happy to be totally proven wrong because now down the line they're absolutely nailing it in the role, and I think sometimes, to semi-contradict myself, sometimes people struggle with anxiety or they struggle with, like, the nerves of a new job, and they need to settle a little bit before they get to show their best selves, and I guess it's determining the difference between Does this person just not have the skill set, or is there something getting in the way of this person doing their best work? And the latter is totally solvable when you have to, as a manager, do your best, so much of management is just enabling people to be their best, and sometimes that's just saying, Hey, you don't have to tell me what's going on, but is there something in your personal life that's maybe making you not show up how you normally do every day? And sometimes all you need from that is Hey, yeah, there's something going on that's making things hard for me right now. Cool, okay, hope you're all right, and then that can be the conversation, and now you can manage with a different context, whereas if it's no, nothing's going on, everything's fine. and this is me at my best, and you're like, Okay, something's not quite right there. TIM: It strikes me, as I've heard you describe these two examples, that you've taken on a lot of the responsibility for these people on your own shoulders, and you seem to act with a high degree of empathy for the people you've brought into your team. Have you changed through time? If, let's say, the bad, how was your first example? Did you become a little bit less empathetic but more like, This is 95 percent your responsibility; it's your job, and I'm just here to nudge you, but ultimately I can't even start to take on the responsibility because that's your responsibility?

EBRAHIM: Such a good question and such a hard point to get right because I think naturally I would love to be 100 percent empathetic. We're all people; we've all been there; we've all had our worst days, weeks, and months, but you can't be naive, and you can't get taken for a ride, so I do think you approach almost everyone with empathy, and you give that trust implicitly. It's okay; we've hired you. We're going to decide to trust you, but don't be stupid. If they break it, kind of thing, if they've shown you that actually they're not someone who can just be trusted implicitly, you can't just continue to be 100 percent empathetic because, unfortunately, there are people out there who will just take you for a ride, collect the paycheck, and they don't give a damn how much harder they're making your life because they just want to call it in. and I think as much as humanly possible you just keep those people out of your team so that you can continue to be trusting and empathetic with everyone like you don't even want to be in a position where you're having to ask that question, Is this person being honest or not? It's like this person shouldn't be around if you don't trust them like that.

TIM: I'm trying to remember a quote frantically. It was something like, Be a sheep on the outside and a lion on the inside, something like that. I Oh yeah, it applies here.

EBRAHIM: Yeah, that makes sense. I think, yeah, maybe you got to look tough as a manager, always thinking, always giving the benefit of the doubt; something might be going on for them. The first question in my head is like, Is something going on for them? That's making things tough, and I think until you rule that out, because if you just come in, someone's having the worst month of their life, and then they start to naturally slip at work, and then their manager's like, Wow, you're being really crap right now; you're underperforming; we're going to put you on a pit, that's just going to make it even worse. So you're going to—you've got to avoid that.

TIM: What about on the other side of the table? In your experience as a candidate, is there any particular experience that springs to mind as being memorable, either for the good or bad reasons?

EBRAHIM: Yes, I will say that my experience getting hired into Rocket Mill is now PMG. I feel like a celebrity being paid to endorse a brand a little bit, but I have to remind myself to state it so when Rocket Mill hired me, they were unbelievably keen, and it was like I actually applied to them on LinkedIn. But it was the quickest interview turnaround in my life. They were like, Oh, you're a good fit. Can you do a call tomorrow? Neil, the head of analytics, isn't free, but he's the chief operational officer, and I was like, I'm not that senior, and I'm getting C suite on the phone to talk to me, because they were like, We don't want to lose this chance to see if it's a good fit. And I actually was already in like the final stages of another interview process to be like a slash web analyst data scientist at another agency, which was really appealing to me at the time, but RocketMill was like adamant that I was the right fit, and they were just doing whatever they needed to get on the phone quickly. They were like, Yep, Joe really liked you. We'd like you now to talk to Neil, who's now free in two days, and it was like a straight-through, really candid conversation. Neil then asked me, like, the five toughest analytics questions. I've never gotten an interview, but it was great because I was like, Okay, this agency is serious This guy knows his stuff as well. We had a really engaging chat about the landscape of marketing analytics, and it was like really stimulating, and then the CEO, one of the founders, Sam Garrity, then jumped on the phone and wanted to talk to me and left me feeling completely inspired by that conversation because he was like, Here's how we see you fitting in. Here's how we see the future for you: We'd hire you in at the senior manager level. We can see you going up to director, and I was like, Never had I had a company who I was potentially going to work for pushing for a promotion for me before I'd even got there, and it was like amazing to see that they'd been like, We like your experience. We like the way you've spoken to us. We already carved out a future for you, so for me that was like one of the most inspiring interview processes, and ultimately I chose them over the other agency because of the cultural fit. It just felt like a really warm place to move into, and there was so much personality behind each of these people that I'd met: Joe, Neil, and Sam. and I was like, All of these guys have been a treat to talk to. I actually want to spend more time with them and get to know them, and that really drew me in like a magnet.

TIM: That's amazing. That's a masterclass in recruitment marketing in how well they presented themselves and, of course, followed through on it, and it's all well and good to have all the shiny stuff, but they backed it up, and it's also interesting, yeah, when a company wants to move quickly for the right person, they can, and what an advantage that was for them because you say you're at the later stages of another role. If they had the typical four, five, or six-week turnaround time, you would probably not be working there now.

EBRAHIM: Yeah.

TIM: Yeah, so there's a massive opportunity cost of hiring too slowly.

EBRAHIM: Yeah, yeah, precisely, and that's one of the things I really enjoyed about RocketMill: it was just this team that moves; we don't dilly-dally, and we try to keep that going with the way we hire. Now to answer the other side of the coin in terms of my worst hiring process: fresh-eyed graduate Did a degree in biomed Had no idea what I wanted to do with my life; I just knew it didn't involve being in a lab for 14 hours a day anymore. So, there are only so many hours a man can spend in a dark room looking under a microscope. Better people than I are doing that stuff and changing the world, but I was like, I don't fancy changing the world. Actually, I'm going to give that one up. I'd been around the block on trying to get all sorts of roles; something numbers/ programming-based was really my direction, which is pretty broad, unfortunately, and data analytics is a huge spectrum of roles. and they're all very different careers, so when you don't know what you're trying to do and you're just becoming a data analyst, it can be really tricky because you're falling down all sorts of rabbit holes. Your CV is super generic. You're not really drilling into anything in particular where a hiring manager is going to be like, This person's a good fit because this person is just a fit for anything. So I was doing online courses and learning stuff at home. I was bartending. I was coaching weightlifting. I was tutoring math. I was having to learn the math and then tutor it on the same day, which was a nightmare. Circle theorems—who remembers circle theorems? So, long story short, I finally get into this interview process for a data science academy. and this is like the dream where they're going to train you up; they're going to pay you not a lot, especially back then, but they're going to train you up, and I was working in recruitment at the time and less than loving it, no offense to recruiters at all; it's an amazing job to do well, but I was finding it really tough. I get in this hiring process for this data science academy, which involves all these online tasks, and then you've got to submit these tests online and aptitude and abstract reasoning and blah blah blah blah. Invite me in for an assessment day, so I take a day off my recruitment job to go to this assessment day down in the Royal Docks. And it's literally a nine-to-six PM, full-on day of five distinct one-hour assessments. They had us like writing code; they had us designing an app. I didn't have an idea for an app at all, so I didn't do well on that one, and then it was a pretty intensive, long day. They got us really excited about the role. A couple of days later, I had a phone interview where they were like, Hey, we're just going to have the kind of conversation aspect of the interview process, and the conversation was like an hour long. It went really well. They were like, Look, from my POV, you're a great fit. I think we'd love to have you there. We're just waiting on your test results, so my expectations and my hopes are really up here. The next day it turns out I failed one of the exams by a few points, but I passed everything else, and I called the same recruiter up, and I was like, Hey, so you said you liked me. I'm just down on this one exam. Can you, like, do anything to let me in? I do think I worked really hard and did well, and they were like, Sorry, we have a really strict rule: if you don't pass all of them, you don't get in. It was an unfortunate situation, and I don't blame them for not passing me, but I think That phone interview really got my hopes up, and I was like, You know, my whole life was geared up on going into this thing, so I think having that scenario where you put so much in, they raise your expectations so high, just to fall out by a few points on one of their exams, which felt abstract, was really disappointing. So much so that I immediately handed in my notice at the recruitment job because I just could; it made me realize how much I was not enjoying that there and then started my journey into marketing analytics.

TIM: Yeah, that's a great story and a reminder that all of life's disappointments come from a mismatch between expectations and reality, and unfortunately your expectations were unfairly inflated, and yeah, people should be more careful with their words.

EBRAHIM: Unfortunately, yes, no resentment, of course. Everything's worked out just fine, but it's tough when you really want that job and you think it's the thing that's going to solve everything, and you don't get it. It can hurt, especially when the interview process is so long.

TIM: Especially early on in your career, I think when you haven't had that experience, maybe you don't have the leverage that you have now. Each one job is probably more important in a sense than what it is a bit later in your career.

EBRAHIM: 100% I wouldn't go back to being a grad for anything. I think the hardest job hunt of your life is that first step into your career.

TIM: awesome