📋 The zero-touch interview process for hiring superstars – with Brett Nowak, founder at Liquid & Grit 🤸

Brett Nowak is the founder of Liquid & Grit, a product research company for games, that creates actionable reports about new game features and industry trends for game developers.

In our interview today, Brett describes his unique approach to hiring. He has developed an interview and onboarding process guaranteed to remove biases, get the best person for each role, and thus develop a quality team that involves almost no talking or in-person interaction with the candidates. Today, we dive into this fascinating and counterintuitive approach to hiring.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

👥 What inspired Brett’s zero-touch hiring process.

0️⃣ What the zero-touch hiring process looks like – and what it optimizes for.

📡 How a remote hiring process eliminates biases; even unknown ones.

⛰️ Using lean methodology to build a topnotch team.

🏃🏿‍♂️ Why it is important to emphasize diligence over domain expertise.

🌠 Does experience correlate with performance?

💬 Examples of responses to a test in Liquid & Grit’s hiring process.

🌎 Top talent exists everywhere. Even on Craigslist.

🤐 Liquid & Grit’s zero-touch onboarding process. Is it weird not to talk to a human during onboarding?

🍪 Almost everything can be templatized.

👎 The surprising way that emotional attachment is a liability.

KEY QUOTES

How to remove bias from hiring

We’re really just optimising for finding people who are very diligent and excellent at the job that we want them to do. And also to remove biases from the hiring process, which has been a wonderful byproduct of the process. And we don’t even know the sex of the person or the demographic or background or really much about them—other than they’re very good at doing the thing that we are planning on having them do.

Contextual hiring process sets expectations

These tests are not like: “How many balloons fill a box?” or some random question. They’re very specific to the thing that they’ll be doing. So if they’re an editor, there’ll be editing; if they’re an analyst, they’ll be analysing; if they’re going to do data, they’ll be downloading spreadsheets.

And then when they fill out their tests, they’re going to respond into a Google form. We have all of the candidates in a spreadsheet. And we can compare their results to each other, which is really great, because we’re not just talking about one person in a vacuum. We’re actually opening up their spreadsheets, opening up their answers and comparing one to the other to the other. From there, we have about an 85% fail rate for each test, so we get down to 2-3 people.

Optimize for the traits that are necessary

We actually don’t give a lot of instruction, because at our company we don’t do a lot of hand-holding. So we actually want to see how you respond to that. And we do say it’s okay to ask questions, but it’s sort of intuitive what questions are the right ones to ask.

The ones that end up getting the jobs are the ones that say: “I googled this, and you didn’t really specify this, so I found out about this on another website. And you have this wrong. So I fixed that.” They go the extra mile.

Experience isn’t an indicator of ability

But, for example, we’ve hired editors—and I’ve gone through hundreds, hundreds of editors, and this is outside of games—and the two best editors I’ve found have no experience editing. One is a lawyer and the other one just happened to respond to a Craigslist ad. Our lead analyst worked at a grocery store, before this.

Great candidates have one key attribute

What I haven’t really stressed is the importance I found of finding someone who’s diligent. Diligence is a skill or trait that you’ve taught yourself or you’ve been taught before. And that’s not something I can teach. And so we really optimised to find diligent people; the gaming stuff is a lot easier to teach somebody.

Attitude cannot be taught

If someone comes to our company, we don’t believe that we have the ability to shape that person; that person is probably shaped at this point in their life. We’re just going to be able to teach them skills.

Remove randomness from hiring

The great thing about this process is I don’t have to really tell you who is a great candidate, because you can compare every single person’s response, they’re getting the same exact question. And so when you go into your Google Sheet—with Google Forms, when you upload, it goes into a Google spreadsheet—you compare every single candidate’s responses to the same exact question, which, again, removes the bias of somebody going in interviewing somebody, asking a set of questions, another person asking a random set of questions, another person, etc.

Why choosing candidates becomes easier

You’re not comparing apples to apples to apples. What we do is just the same question. So you just open up those tabs, and you can see them so clearly. It’s obvious that this person’s graphs just jump out at you and this other person’s graphs just don’t.

We all have hidden biases

We hired someone named Jordan, and I didn’t know if it was a man or woman. I actually thought it was a man; speaking of biases, I assumed it was a man. And when I saw her Google image, it was a woman. It’s just amazing how easy it is to be biased.

Quality is everywhere

My head analyst; she’s just one of the most incredible people I’ve ever worked with. Ever. And I’ve worked in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and all that good stuff for a long time. So the quality of people you can find on Craigslist is just astounding, too.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth: I am very excited to welcome Brett Nowak to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Brett, welcome to the show.

Brett: Thanks for having me.

Shamanth: Brett, I’m excited to have you here today because the first time we spoke, it was my intention that we would end up talking about a lot of what you do: which is deconstruct games, analyse games, dig into what makes some features work and some not to work, which I find fascinating. I really thought we would talk about that.

But in the course of our last conversation, as it turns out, you shared with me an aspect of your work which I found to be even more fascinating: which is how you hire and how you have a remote hiring process that comes about as close to eliminating hiring biases as I have seen. So I figured that would be a good topic for us to talk about today. To kick this off, tell us about what inspired your hiring process.

Brett: A couple different things. One was when I worked at companies, I felt like the hiring process emphasised personality and fit too much. And those are important, but it didn’t focus enough on people’s ability to do the job that they are hired to do.

I also wanted to have a process that was fairly inexpensive to execute, because I felt like having a topnotch team was predicated on the idea of hiring people easily. Because if you can easily hire people, then you’re more likely to let people who aren’t top notch go.

And the third thing was that I feel that the hiring process in general is very difficult. It’s very hard to be accurate. So I wanted to build a process that, somewhat like lean methodology, got people through our funnel quickly and efficiently, and got them to do actual work. So we can see what they did rather than rely on our interview process.

Shamanth: Yeah. And once you think about the conventional interview process from the lens of some of the things you’re talking about, you do realise that a lot of the interview process optimises for things that may not always be good predictors of performance. So if we had to speak to your process, what are you optimising for in your process?

Brett:

We’re also optimising for having them experience what our culture is like through the process, and having them not experiencing one thing in the interview process and then have something else go on when they are working here.

Shamanth: Yeah, and what does your hiring process look like? What are the different steps involved?

Brett: First we’re a 100% remote company, so that plays into it. And then for the hiring process, when we have something that we want to hire for, it is a unique role. Meaning that, it’s not something that’s defined in the market—something to find in the market might be a WordPress editor. So it’s something somewhat unique to us.

We post a job generally on Craigslist; it’s been very effective for us. We’ve found Ivy League grads, to people who don’t have a college degree and in between; all very excellent at what we need them to do. We post a job description, and then we have a series of tests.

The first test is fairly easy, but a lot of people don’t read Craigslist ads. So you can filter out people who aren’t really serious. And then we have a series of two to three additional tests that we have them go through, which are very specific to what they’ll be doing.

So they’re not like: “How many balloons fill a box?” or some random question. They’re very specific to the thing that they’ll be doing. So if they’re an editor, there’ll be editing; if they’re an analyst, they’ll be analysing; if they’re going to do data, they’ll be downloading spreadsheets.

And then when they fill out their tests, they’re going to respond into a Google form. We have all of the candidates in a spreadsheet. And we can compare their results to each other, which is really great, because we’re not just talking about one person in a vacuum. We’re actually opening up their spreadsheets, opening up their answers and comparing one to the other to the other. From there, we have about an 85% fail rate for each test, so we get down to 2-3 people.

Then we do a paid test. So we have about a 5-7 hour paid test, where they do something, again, very specific to what they’d be doing on the job. We pay them because we feel 5-7 hours is a lot of time to commit to something. And we realise 2 of the 3 may not get the job. And we pay them by their hourly rate that they would get. And then, from there, we hire at least 1 person.

We also have the onboarding from there completely virtual. So we have all of our onboarding videos recorded. We have an onboarding standardisation doc that they read; all the emails that they receive are templatized, meaning that we just do a shortcode, and they get spit out. So they onboard without really much of any cost on our end. And we tell them that the next 2-3 weeks are an extension of the hiring process. Because we feel we can see them work; see them interact in the company culture; and then from there, if they make it past that 3-4 week period, that’s generally considered to be a hire.

Shamanth: Sure. So it’s clearly very elaborate and well thought out as a process. Out of curiosity, a lot of the work you guys do could be considered fairly niche. For instance, deconstructing games or looking at game mechanics or game features isn’t something that a lot of people have domain knowledge or skills in. So do you find that it’s a problem that you’re just giving these assignments to people who have no experience with these things at all?

Brett: Yes, and I think that we have found that, given our potential pool of candidates is the entire world that’s on the internet—or anybody who is going to look at an ad, it’s massive—

we actually don’t give a lot of instruction, because at our company we don’t do a lot of hand-holding. So we actually want to see how you respond to that. And we do say it’s okay to ask questions, but it’s sort of intuitive what questions are the right ones to ask.

The ones that end up getting the jobs are the ones that say: “I googled this, and you didn’t really specify this, so I found out about this on another website. And you have this wrong. So I fixed that.” They go the extra mile.

What we found is that, for whatever reason, there’s a pearl of a person out there that fits this job. They just get it; they just have the skill set. For whatever reason, they’re super diligent; they understand games; they know how to break it down; they don’t need a lot of hand-holding; and we’re just looking for that person. And it’s just our job to find that person.

Shamanth: Sure. And do you find that the fact that they’ve never broken down a game before is not a hurdle at all?

Brett:

We have found that experience does not predict ability in our company. We do not say that you have to have any experience, but we do find that if they’re going to be an analyst that knowledge of games really does help. And we generally don’t find people who don’t know games and then are really good at the analysis part.

But, for example, we’ve hired editors—and I’ve gone through hundreds, hundreds of editors, and this is outside of games—and the two best editors I’ve found have no experience editing. One is a lawyer and the other one just happened to respond to a Craigslist ad. Our lead analyst worked at a grocery store, before this.

I did actually hire in the industry, initially; I hired QA people. I thought: “Hey, they would have a lot of knowledge of games, and they would be great at this job.”

Shamanth: Yeah. And that’s so fascinating, because I think the conventional view of hiring and recruiting is to optimise for domain knowledge. And I’m sure that there is some amount of talk of hiring for attitude, but I think that comes a very, very distant second. And I don’t think diligence, in the way that you phrase it, occupies as important a place in conventional hiring practices. And clearly it sounds like you ended up hiring some very unexpectedly great people.

Brett: Yeah, it was honestly through my first couple hires, where I hired somebody—again who had no experience—and she’s just the most amazing worker I’ve ever worked with. That made me decide that experience adds value—if that person had experience, obviously that would have helped her—but I think you limit who you can hire by putting in experience as a requirement. Teaching somebody to do something is, again, so much easier than finding someone who is an excellent worker, super diligent, is very driven, self motivated, fits in your system, etc. Like those are qualities that, if they don’t have them, you’re not going to teach them.

I think that’s really an important fundamental of our process is that:

A) We don’t believe that we can actually hire well in a traditional sense. Like: “I know you’re a good worker.” I don’t think that I can see that by talking. And I think a lot of biases kick in.

That’s honestly a human bias; this overconfidence in our ability of humans. It’s kind of the background of lean methodology in general. Let data show you what’s reality, as opposed to letting yourself predict what reality is.

Shamanth: Yeah, you trust what’s coming back to you from the candidates. So, to get an understanding of your process in a little more detail, what’s an example of a test you gave? And what’s an example of a great response, and a response that wasn’t so great?

Brett: Let’s see, for a position like a numbers analyst, we hired recently, we had them download a spreadsheet off of FiveThirtyEight website, where they have all these spreadsheets. Do an analysis of the data and then upload into our Google Form and their spreadsheet uploaded into Google Sheets.

We’re hiring a gaming analyst position right now. And we actually, for those, have correct and incorrect answers. They’re really hard. So if they get 5 out of 6, right, they’re going to pass into the next phase. But once you start seeing, towards the end, in their answers, you can see their paragraphs are correct. Their sentence structure goes the extra mile.

And that’s what’s beautiful about the process for me, as well, is I wanted to eliminate the time I spent on the interview process, because I felt like I was spending a lot of time and as a founder, you really want to be cautious of your time. And by having each candidate do the exact same thing, someone else in your team could very easily do the vetting of the person because they can compare each answer. And so that makes it a very scalable process. You just set up the test. And this point, actually, I haven’t even set up the test. So it’s really hands off for me; I don’t really involve myself in hiring at all.

And we have the whole process written out. In fact, we just posted for a job. I had my chief of staff talk to the person who was hired last, and she had written out our standardisation documents. So she just pointed the chief of staff to the standardisation document and she just used the templated response. We used the same Google Form, we use the same process and now the chief of staff is owning it.

Shamanth: Yeah. Right, which also speaks to how much can be standardised. Like you said, you no longer even need to set the questions, because clearly for an analyst there is a standard set of analyzable data. And presumably, the next time you hire an analyst, you could use most of the same questions that you use the last time around. So definitely, I think it’s impressive how much can be standardised.

So, to switch gears a bit: once you do hire people, my understanding is that your onboarding is also fully remote. And you don’t talk to anybody that’s onboarded. So tell us about why your onboarding is structured in this manner.

Brett: Just to save time for me, and then to limit the emotional attachment. I did an onboarding call with somebody and spent 45 minutes telling them about our company, and I felt it was very valuable for that person. But I realised I was going to have to give this spiel over and over again if I hired more people, so I just ended up hanging up the phone, and then recording myself have the same exact conversation again. And then I uploaded it to our Dropbox file, named it ‘Onboarding video’, and included it in the templatized onboarding video, so that I never have to give that speech.

Again, people might think: “Well, there’s value in you talking to people.” I agree, there’s pluses and minuses to anything. But what’s great about that—in addition to saving the time—is that when I see mistakes from this person that we hired, and it’s week 2 or 3, I haven’t invested any time on that person. I don’t actually have any emotional attachment to this person. I don’t know anything about this person.

I ended up letting her go, but that’s a templated email as well.

So that’s a really important part of the process is, as humans again, we have to understand we have emotional attachment and things like that. And we will convince ourselves: “Well, let’s keep this person—they’re a good person—I like them—we spent all this time with them.” All those excuses will keep these people with you for longer and longer periods of time. Whereas at week 3, we don’t really feel that attachment, and so we can let them go very easily. That’s a really important part of this whole process.

I will add that no one has ever left our company, and we’ve been in existence for 5 years now. People who end up staying love our company, and love that we are super diligent with hiring because they work with such great people.

Shamanth: Yeah. So for, again, an outsider looking in at this process that says: “Oh, my God, is it weird to not talk to a human during the interviewing and onboarding?” How do you think about that? If somebody asks you at a party, how would you respond?

Brett: Yeah, a lot of people do think it’s weird. And the other thing about it is that it represents the culture of our company. We don’t actually talk a lot as a company; we have zero meetings a week. And that’s not an exaggeration. We had one meeting a week, about a month ago, and the team decided to cancel that one meeting. I have one meeting a week with my head analyst. And that is often cancelled. So that’s my only meeting; my only internal meeting. The team’s 15 people. So we’re big enough that you might expect me to have a lot of meetings.

I wanted the onboarding process to feel like it was going to be during their experience of the company. I think that’s important because, obviously, you want a cultural fit, and you want them to be okay with that. I didn’t want them to have 20 phone calls in the first 2 weeks, and then, all of a sudden, they don’t talk to anybody for months. I’ve had people work for me for over a year that I’ve never talked to; that wouldn’t be abnormal for me to have a bunch of people who work with me for over a year that I’ve never talked to.

Shamanth: Yeah, meetings. They’re one of the things that a lot of people take as a necessary evil of doing business, of doing work. I think even though people subscribe to the idea that: “Oh, we should have fewer meetings,” a lot of people find it hard to actually do that reduction. It’s impressive that you’ve done zero; you’ve gone to zero meetings a week! Maybe that could be the topic of our next podcast episode: “How to run a 15-person company on zero meetings a week.” Yeah, that’s definitely impressive.

So, with a lot of these processes that you run very successfully, what are some of the things that have surprised you?

Brett: The first is how well it’s worked; that’s somewhat of a surprise. The second has probably been the resistance from other people. Like you said, when I bring this up to other people, they quickly figure out a reason why it wouldn’t work for them. It’s just: “Oh, well, it wouldn’t work at our company because—”

It’s fine, because I feel the process is so great. And again, I haven’t talked about a ton. But a wonderful byproduct of this whole process is the elimination of biases, which obviously is super important today. I’ve never seen my lead. I haven’t seen anyone, and I don’t know anything about these people, in terms of any bias. So it’s a wonderful byproduct of it.

The other is again, just people’s resistance to this unique, different approach to stuff, and also probably the quality that you can find on Craigslist.

My lead writer—I’ve never seen his face, and he’s worked for me for a year. This is a very important person in my company. He went to an Ivy League school. I found him on Craigslist. He is amazing. He’s just incredibly smart.

My head analyst; she’s just one of the most incredible people I’ve ever worked with. Ever. And I’ve worked in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and all that good stuff for a long time. So the quality of people you can find on Craigslist is just astounding, too.

Shamanth: Yeah, certainly. Part of the reason why I also had this conversation was a purely selfish reason that we are fully remote. We have a process that has some elements of what you have. We give paid tests as well, to a lot of our candidates. And yet I think there’s just so much to learn from the way you do things. I do appreciate the specificity with which you describe a lot of this, Brett.

This has been great. And perhaps this is a good place for us to start to wrap up. As we do wrap, can you tell folks how they can find out more about you and everything you do?

Brett: You could find us at Liquid & Grit to find out more about our company. If you have questions about the hiring process or some of the unique things we do at our company, the best thing to do is probably reach out to me at LinkedIn or email me. I’m happy to chat with you more about it.

Shamanth: Excellent. We will link to all of that in the show notes. But for now, thank you for being on the Mobile User Acquisition Show.

Brett: Yeah, thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

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