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Ask HN: Assessment tools for early employees/CTOs?

2 points by flave ↗ HN
Does anyone have any suggestions for a simple, reasonably quick (for the candidate) service focusing on 'core skills' like aptitude, reasoning, communication and personality type?

We're in the process of hiring our first hire - this is a software engineer who will ideally grow into a CTO and a co-founder.

The market for 'candidate assessment' is very corporate and includes things like anti-cheating systems and tech tests - I think both of these would be off-putting, useless and condescending for the type of candidates I'm trying to attract.

6 comments

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kadushka
Are you looking for a cofounder or an employee? It’s like to be looking for a secretary who will ideally grow into a wife.
flave
Employee. But someone will, ideally, accrue significant equity over time and grow into a leadership position as the company expands. We're funded so it's paid at market rate.

I know it sounds silly but as a startup grows, later in the process investors will want you to have a 'co-founder' who could basically take over if the original founder couldn't for any reason. It's de-risking. Probably needs a different title than 'co-founder'.

kadushka
If you’re not offering an equal share in the company, then you shouldn’t mention the word cofounder – it’s misleading. You are looking for a regular employee, so evaluate candidates to make sure they’re capable of doing the task you’ll be paying them to do.
flave
Okay cool - please take that as the spirit of the question - in this case do you have a suggestion?
kadushka
Invite candidates to spend 2-3 days working together on some task - as a short trial. See how much they accomplish in that time, and how easy it is to work with them. Does not have to be onsite. Pay them well for their time.
flave
In the nicest possible way - nobody talented in my market of is going to take three days off from their job to come work on me on a random project - no matter how much I pay them. All the good/driven people are working on stuff.

A one-hour collaborative problem-solving interview is a great idea.

But, the challenge I have is that I want some kind of measure of aptitude that isn't subjective. I've seen that founders tend to overestimate their ability to basically 'vibe' someone based on interview and the point of this question is to try to hedge that.