Hiring is hard. It seems everyone is trying different kinds of experimental hiring techniques. The STAR method is very common these days for assessing critical soft skills. My guess is a bunch of them are not going to pan out, but I did find the “two-hand” hiring process to be promising.

Elon Musk has been using this technique for a long time. It’s called “two hand” testing because he focuses on candidates’ first hand experience, and hands-on testing.

First Hand Experience means to select candidates with real life, first hand experience with the role/tasks needing to be done. Real world experience is a better teacher than universities or classes. You can sometimes get amazing non-traditional candidates if they demonstrate more first-hand experience than those that just took courses.

Hands-on Testing means to give the candidate real world tasks to demonstrate hands on competence. It’s easy to inflate skills and capabilities, but practical tests related to the role give recruiters an excellent gauge of actual ability. This requires a bit more work from the recruiters to build real-world tests – even to the point of giving an actual task they might get with anonymized data.

Read more about the technique and some research here.