For section b

Your Hiring Process Tells People About Your Company

Google was famous or infamous for its brutal hiring process. (Side note: I was often amazed as I read interview feedback after I joined theres no way I could have answered some of the questions! I guess I got lucky) Engineers were interviewed by 6 8 people. A few asked coding questions youd be expected to write code on the whiteboard. Others asked architecture or logical questions (for example, I was asked how to know whether to recrawl a page, and how to plan for how often). I had a set of logic questions I asked regularly. All in all, the process was painful. Hiring shows a great deal about a culture. Are interviewees rewarded for sycophancy? Are all the interviews just reviews, over and over again, of the resume? Do candidates only see their potential manager? These are all awful cultural signals; nobody should want to work at a hierarchical, political place. As a candidate, how youre interviewed gives you great insight into a company. Even though it was a gauntlet to run, there were some great aspects of the Google hiring process. We tended to get great applicants through. Like any assessment process, we had false negatives, where we failed to hire great people. We designed the process to have more false negatives than false positives (in which we would have hired people we shouldnt have). When we founded ZestFinance, we tried to take the best of the hiring process while mixing in some key aspects of our culture. Our culture is very data-driven, but we work hard to move quickly, avoiding paralysis by analysis. All other things being equal, we value horsepower more than skill, and we value diversity. We try to have fun, while working hard. If you are a candidate, you should be able to see these cultural beliefs in our hiring process. If you get an interview at Zest, heres whats going to happen. First, a few days before, we are going to send you some homework. Well ask you to spend only a couple of hours on it the problems are pretty easy, on purpose. When you come in for your interview, first, you will present your homework solution to a wide group of us, from different areas. Well be looking at the quality of your solution, but also how well you can deal with questions, and especially questions from folks with different experiences. After that, youll have about 2 interviews before lunch. These interviews will likely be technical, but might not be traditional question-and-answer interviews for example, software engineers are usually asked to pair program on some real code with current engineers. Then, youll go to lunch with a set of Zestians who did NOT interview you. This is a way for you to see the broader culture and see if you like the people at the company; its also a way for us to assess your ability to interact with us in an unstructured manner.

After lunch, youll probably have another 3 technical interviews, followed by an interview with someone non-technical. The non-technical person might be our general counsel, or our head of HR, or our head of corporate communications. They arent going to ass ess your coding skills. Instead, they are going to try and assess your fit with the culture in a more formal manner. It doesnt matter how strong you are technically if you wont fit our culture, we wont move forward. Whenever I can, I will interview yo u at the end of the day (Ill ask a bunch of logic questions, by the way.) (Side note: Id like to meet every candidate. I try to manage my calendar to spend about a third of my time on hiring and interviewing. But I often fail. Room for improvement, I suppose!) About 30 minutes after youve left, everyone who interviewed you will all get back together. Each person has submitted (in advance) feedback on their interview with you, including a score from 1 to 4. We go around the table, getting everyones score s, and, based on the average and the general feedback, decide to make an offer or not. You will get a call back that night with our decision. How does this process match our culture? First, we are data driven we score people in a standardized fashion but we move quickly youll hear the same day. We try to measure your horsepower by seeing you react to questions more than the beauty of your code. We will look at you in semi-social situations to see if youre going to thrive in our culture. We also have a high reject rate, many of whom are likely great employees. But startups must be exceptionally careful to avoid the false positives bad employees can poison an entire team and are hard to shed. Avoiding them in the first place is the win. And you as a candidate should be comfortable with the culture of the company you might join; you shouldnt take an offer from a company that doesnt show you their culture, or shows you a bad culture. You will spend several years there, you should choose wisely. Good hiring is in everyones best interest. More companies should think about their process, what it shows about them, and how it selects new employees.

Forbes

Four Reasons For Yahoo's Four-Year Slump (YHOO)

Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock's plan was to name a new CEO before 2009. Hasn't happened yet and there's only a week to go, so we're prepared to be shocked -- shocked! -- that Yahoo might take more time to make its decision than originally anticipated. But in case you are the leading candidate for the job -- despite, perhaps, only joining Yahoo's board this fall -- you'll want to be prepared if the chairman and his pal on the board Gary Wilson do call you up for an interview between now and the New Year. Lucky for you (and we do mean you, former Nextel Partners CEO John Chapple), Ironfire capital manager Eric Jackson -- who finally sold his hedge fund's stake in Yahoo (YHOO) last fall but still has plenty of sources at the company -- just wrote an article titled "Reasons Behind Yahoo!'s Four-Year Slump" for TheStreet.com. We've edited down to four reasons for Yahoo's four-year slump, in bulletpoints below: Lack of Product Leadership: "From Yahoo!'s founding, the company has had its fingers in a lot of pies. Through Bubble 1.0 and Bubble 2.0, the Yahoo! M&A machine was always humming to suck up venture-backed firms at healthy valuations. Integrating them cohesively was a different story and left a string of disparate businesses under the Yahoo! roof." Self-Isolated Leadership: "Executives often didn't engage in detailed discussions with lowerlevel managers responsible for areas that were under-performing. "I would have liked to talk

to them more," said one ex-Yahoo!. "I had one good conversation with [one Yahoo! executive] and one good one with [another executive] in [the last few years]. That's it. I know others tried to educate them on the issues. Nothing came of it. One group that Yahoo! executives were not shy about consulting in the last four years: the consultants. "There were way too many consultants and too many planning sessions. We needed more execution," said a former employee." Tolerating a Non-Performance Culture: Over time, it appears most employees stopped pushing for the changes they wanted to see. When they tried and it fell on deaf ears, they backed down. "I think a lot of people also knew they wouldn't get similar jobs elsewhere and decided to keep quiet." The tone got set from the top, and it trickled down to permeate the organization. Matrix Organizational Structure: One of the recommendations that Yahoo!'s consultants made a few years ago was to institute a so-called matrix organizational structure across the company. A matrix structure seeks to overcome the complexity of a large global organization by assigning multiple bosses to employees in different geographies working on similar product or functional tasks. In other words, you report up to two or more bosses -- a product or functional boss and a geographical boss. They create confusion about who is responsible for certain actions. The "shared" ownership of tasks and projects across multiple groups and bosses means that it's difficult to go back and assign blame for and learn from failures.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/12/four-reasons-for-yahoos-four-year-slumpyhoo#ixzz2My4VrL5C

Yahoo CEO outlines new corporate structure

(AP) A week after announcing a painful round of job cuts, Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson unveiled a plan Tuesday that will reorganize the company into three main divisions focused on users, advertisers and technology. Thompson unveiled the plan at an "all hands" meeting for employees at the company's headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif. It will take effect May 1. According to a memo obtained by The Associated Press, the new structure aims to improve users' experience with Yahoo, work closely with advertisers in different regions of the globe, and bolster its technology group. Thompson said in a memo distributed to staff "It's time for Yahoo to move forward, and fast." http://www.thebusinessjournal.com/news/state/1444-yahoo-ceo-outlines-new-corporatestructure 04/10/2012 - 12:52 pm