No Jerks. No Divas. No Drama.

At Astellas we have an open position for a pharmacometrician. My colleague, Stacey Tannenbaum, posted the position on LinkedIn and Peiying Zuo later reposted it commenting that you should choose a boss, not a job, or where the job is. That got me thinking about what we look for in a new hire. Certainly, a strong technical background is a high priority, but is that the only important thing and is that the top of the list? Certainly not to the first question and absolutely not to the second. If hiring was based only on technical skill then hiring would be easy - look at their portfolio of work and pick the strongest candidate. But that is not the only criteria. The fit of the candidate into the group and into the company culture is important, probably the most important criteria. What am I saying here? It’s not the

technical skill or experience that gets you the job, it’s how well you interact with the others that is often the deciding factor.

In 2008 Google decided to study what made a good employee. They coined this

study Project Oxygen and what they found was surprising. After data mining all

their hiring, firing, and performance reviews data, they identified certain

factors that favor success. They were factors like “are they a good thinker and

problem solver?”, “do they listen well?”, and “do they have empathy towards

others?” While these factors are not necessarily surprising, what was surprising was that technical skill was at the bottom of the list. Being the best technically was not a very good predictor of being the most successful. This point gets lost in graduate school and even among many once they move onto a professional role.

These results are often misinterpreted by saying that technical skill is not important for success. They are, of course, but it should be apparent that this is conditional success, in the sense that you have to have a certain degree of technical skill to even get the interview in the first place. Technical skills should be considered the bare minimum for success, a steppingstone if you will for success, not the reason for success.

As a hiring manager, how do you judge how well a person will fit into a role or an organization? Interviews are notoriously bad at choosing the best candidate for a position. They are too short and only show a tiny fraction of an interviewee’s behavior. I am reminded of an interview we did at a company I was at many years ago. We brought a guy in that looked great on paper. Good school, experienced, and seemed really great. After the interview, we were all brought into a room by our boss and asked what we thought. Pretty standard fare. We were all in agreement he should be hired. Then my boss brought in a woman who used to work for the man, and she proceeded to tell us how when she did not do things according to his standards he would yell at her and once threw a stapler at her. He did not get the job and we got a valuable lesson about interviewing people. Over time, this lesson and working at many companies over the years led me to one of my hiring rules: No jerks. No Divas. No Drama. I started looking for people that would get along in the group. Like Google, technical skill gets your foot in the door, but it’s how you act once inside that

seals the deal.

But how do you tell if someone is a diva or a jerk during an interview when they are often on their best behavior? References from human resources are worthless since companies can be sued for giving a negative behavioral reference. I try to look at how they interact when no one is watching. How do they treat the administrative staff? The cafeteria staff? Do they mansplain? If they ruffle the feathers of my admin, forget it. They would have to walk on water to get hired by me. Today, social media is often used for hiring. For some reason, people feel compelled to post their inner-most troll on social media. I try to find people that worked with them and ask them one question “do they work well with others?” Often how they answer can give you the answer you need.

While the No Jerks rule may lead to a less toxic workplace, it is not perfect. Because while I might follow the rule, other departments might not and let’s face it, people are people. And while I like a drama-free workplace, I have come to realize that to succeed as a modeler there needs to be a little diva in all of us. Being a diva is the outward manifestation of our confidence, in the face of all the naysayers. While often a negative stereotype, being a bit of a diva can give us the confidence to handle the nay-sayers when we bring a difficult model to teams or when the predictions from our models run counter-intuitive to what was expected. We need a little bit of diva to handle the sometimes-withering criticism that can come from examination of the model and its results. In the end though, I will always pass on a brilliant jerk and hire the competent non-jerk. As Luis von Ahn, president of the language learning app Duolingo says, “In general in a company, it’s better to have a hole than an a-hole.”