Work hack: Don’t hire work adjacent people
another krappy newsletter #40
Sup homies?
May the fourth be with you. That one is for the pro Star Wars crowd.
I wasn’t into Star Wars until my late 20s. It all changed one fateful Sunday when I was hungover and watched a Star Wars marathon on Freeform television. After that fateful day, I begrudgingly admitted that the series was dece.
But you cannot say “Star Wars is dece” to the devotees of Star Wars as religion. Too many people were losers at age 10 and attached their entire self worth to the series for you to say anything less than “Star Wars is amazing”.
I just think we need to be real. Star Wars is like Olive Garden. Better than you expect. But not as good as your weird neighbor thinks. There is a time and a place for endless breadsticks.
On to the newsletter!
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Work hack: Don’t hire work adjacent people
Back in the day, everyone worked in the physical world and the things they built were their resume.
Carpenters could point to homes.
Blacksmiths could point to horse shoes and swords.
Milly of “Milly’s Dillys” could point to the vibrating pleasure enhancers in her store window.
But in our bizarro knowledge worker world of bits and hyper specialization, we are all so abstracted away from the end “product” that we cannot point to a tangible thing we “made”. This lack of a physical deliverable sets the stage for people who make their entire careers being “work adjacent.”
What does work adjacent mean?
Work adjacent employees show up every day and do tasks that are not exactly the job as much as they are the politics around the job.
They don’t exactly “do” the work as much as they “talk” about the work.
They have job titles without the corresponding skills.
When pressed to explain what it is that they do, they struggle to say anything tangible just like this iconic “Office Space” scene:
I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can’t you understand that! What the hell is wrong with you people!
While funny and fascinating that this type of person can exist, work adjacency is a real problem when you are trying to hire someone for a knowledge worker job. Especially since work adjacent people tend to learn enough subject specific language to convince 99.9% of the population that they can do the job function.
How do you ensure you are not hiring a work adjacent person?
You have to figure out if they are full of shit.
How to figure out if someone is full of shit
In the most famous scene in “The 40 Year Old Virgin”, Steve Carrell’s character compares the feeling of a woman’s breast to a bag of sand.
You know, when you, like, you grab a woman's breast and it's ... And you feel it and ... It feels like a bag of sand when you're touching it.
(For those interested, whole clip here)
The scene ends with his coworkers figuring out he is a virgin because if that’s what he thinks a breast feels like then he has clearly never felt a breast.
This scene highlights a powerful insight: You cannot fake real experience to someone who knows about that experience.
This is a powerful mental model for sussing out who is full of shit and it should be used heavily when hiring someone for a knowledge worker job.
Hypothetical example of how this would play out
Let’s say you run a Peanut Butter and Jelly manufacturing company (PB&J, LLC) and you are looking to hire someone to help produce PB&J with the crusts cut off.
The recruiter brings someone in who worked at Smuckers on the Uncrustables line.
Wow! What applicable experience!
This person starts describing what they did. They describe the end product REALLY well. They cover the peanut butter, the jelly, the two slices of bread, AND how to cut crusts off. Cool.
But you just read another krappy newsletter so you know to probe a bit deeper.
You ask them to walkthrough step by step how you actually make the PB&J.
The alarm bells in your head start going off as the steps they describe seem off.
You combined the peanut butter and jelly into a bowl and whisked it together? Are you a serial killer?
You used a spoon to get the peanut butter and jelly out of the jar? But then how did you cut the crusts off?
Deep in these details you start to find the truth: This person did not make the Uncrustable at Smuckers.
In reality, they monitored the Uncrustable process and understood the politics at Smuckers really well so they were able to keep themselves employed for years.
This person is work adjacent.
You pass on the candidate and reward yourself with a toasted PB&J. So divine.
So that is the lesson.
Knowledge worker interviewing tactic:
Step 1: Have someone who does or has done the job before interview the candidate.
Step 2: As that person probes two or three layers deep into the candidates experience, be on the lookout for “bag of sand” moments.
If they are legit (and you are legit), you will know if they did what they say they did.
Have you had any bag of sand moments in interviews? Email me or leave a comment below. I read everything.
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?