My recent teaching experiment sought to shrink a 250-person class to give each student an individual experience (read more in my last post). How did I do this? With a team of 44 undergraduate teaching assistants. Imagine, if you will, having never managed a group larger than 8 and diving into this role: I had to learn how hire, train, supervise, and support a large team for the first time.

I learned a lot (and I’m going to unpack it via a series of posts). Today I’m talking about hiring.

The Most Important Thing

I started my search by seeking talent. This was a programming course and so I chased after accomplished coders. I found plenty. When I described the project to them, their responses were polarized.

Many gave me blank stares

I’d unrwavel my vision for a course that changes the world by empowering students to make an impact with their projects. The candidates would sit and listen and nod along. Sometimes they’d ask questions about the specifics such as which coding language we’d teach, how many hours, work location, flexibility, pay rate.

They all said, “yep, I could do that.”

And then there’s the ones I hired

I expanded the search to include folks who may not have as much coding experience. During the interview, they interrupted me. They leaned forward in their chairs with a twinkle in their eyes. They’d give ideas off the top of their head for better ways to do things I was describing. They smiled uncontrollably.

To borrow a phrase, they “drank the kool-aid” and it didn’t matter what I did, they were working on this project now. They started contributing right there in the interview.

They all said, “I HAVE to do that!”

It was genuine

What I realize now is that the second group wasn’t faking it. These are the folks I hired and they exceeded my hopes and expectations in every way. This wasn’t a tactic to get hired. It was a position that they truly fit in, a place they HAD to come to work.

Current skill level didn’t matter

Here’s an interesting corollary: the most effective TAs (as measured by the success and perceived satisfaction of their students) weren’t the strongest coders I hired. In fact, some of them never wrote a program in their life. Why were they so good, if they didn’t have expertise?

Passion leads to skill.

They figured out how to code. They stayed up late, worked hard, and learned how. They took online classes. They clicked through tutorials. They latched onto the experts in the group and worked on projects together to see how it was done.

Why? Because they believed so strongly that they HAD to learn to be effective. Not for me. Not to keep their jobs. For themselves and the satisfaction that they get from contributing to something that matters.

The point

When you hunt for jobs, find somewhere that excites you. I mean “HOLD ME BACK I HAVE TO DO THIS!!!!!!” Find somewhere that you lose sleep after the interview because you’re already working there in your mind, trying to solve some problem that was mentioned in the interview.

You can engineer anywhere, engineer somewhere that matters to you. You can manage anywhere, manage somewhere that matters to you. You can write anywhere, write somewhere that matters to you. You can teach anywhere, teach somewhere that matters to you.

Your expertise is secondary to your passion.

You can learn to do anything. I’m not sure you can learn to believe in anything. It’s certainly a bigger hurdle to jump. When you sit in that interview, you’ll be looking to contribute, not hoping to trick them into hiring you.

And recruiters: if you’re tired of ending up with duds at the end of your search, look for these people instead.