CloudKitchens CTO Brian Atwell said he has considered a way to shake up the startup’s hiring process by implementing one of the oldest kinds of tests.
“It probably wouldn’t hurt if you slapped an IQ test in front of the PM in your process,” Atwell told podcaster Ryan Peterman during a recent episode.
Atwell said it’s difficult to design a perfect interview process, particularly one that can’t be gamed. He said that CloudKitchens, Uber cofounder Travis Kalanick’s $15 billion ghost kitchen startup, is conducting 20 experiments at any given time to improve its interview process.
“The reason that companies don’t do it is, it just takes a ton of work to build a good process,” he said. “Like in a tech org, you have dozens of different roles and each one needs different interviews, so the leadership team needs to be really, really dedicated to it.”
In particular, Atwell said hiring project managers is more difficult than hiring software engineers, because some of the tasks a PM performs are “generally less well-defined than the engineering role.”
Adding an IQ test wouldn’t solve everything, but Atwell said such intelligence tests can help cull the initial field of applicants. He said that CloudKitchen’s accounting team already uses IQ tests in its hiring process.
“It wouldn’t help differentiate between the excellent and super excellent, but it would help weed out people very early, and then you could spend more time differentiating between the good versus excellent and the rest of your process,” he said.
Companies like CloudKitchens need such a rigorous process, Atwell said, to make sure they’re hiring quality engineers.
“Like an interview that tests your ability to recall things, your experience, or just your mindsets, does not build a strong engineering team,” he said. “An interview that anyone can pass regardless of IQ, if they can practice enough that does not build a strong engineering team.”
