The Google research blog has an interesting piece on their hiring strategy. These are good ideas, though I’m always a little skeptical of tidy graphs and simulations that show after the fact that your choices were optimal.

Their two key points are to only hire candidates who are above the mean of your current employees, for obvious reasons, and to use no hiring manager, because hiring managers will always prefer some help to no help.  Instead, candidates are interviewed for company fit and then assigned to a team once they meet the bar.

An alternative to no hiring managers is to always give hiring managers too few heads to get the job done.

This strategy aligns incentives nicely– hiring managers know that if they hire someone who is good but not great, they’ll be short staffed.

The alternative strategy taps into whats good about the hiring manager, which is that properly incented, he or she will go the extra mile to track down and sell the right person on the team.

Which strategy is better is debatable, but you certainly can’t compare them with a simple simulation.