And what if we hired randomly?

A couple posts ago, I wrote about letting candidates choose their own hiring process.

But for years, I’ve been toying with the idea of something even more radical — what if we hired randomly?

This sounds silly, but wait! Think of a time you’ve transferred teams, or came in to lead an existing team, or had someone from a different group transferred to your team. This situation is mostly random, especially if the “process” they were hired with varied differently from whatever you have now.

I am not suggesting you start hiring randomly; what I’m suggesting is that you think about how much randomness is already a factor.

It’s unlikely that the greatest teams you’ve worked on were hired with a process you also designed or vetted; or that you even had input into their hiring. But somehow the team became great! Not due to your hiring process.

Hmmmmm….

So the idea of “hiring randomly” is about, “how can we put systems into place that a person hired randomly has a better-than-random shot at thriving?” Or, how can we build a team where adding a random person is likely to make it better?

In an effort to be less prescriptive, I’m going to leave it there for now, but I may pick it up in the future and I hope it is an interesting thought exercise at least.