Nice article, and some good advice. Hiring the right people is a very important function for any business.

One area in the article that makes a lot of sense is to find a way to screen candidates with e-mail mini-essay questions. Although I believe Jason Cohen’s example screening questions could be improved by focusing more on the job functions needed for the position.

For instance:

Jason’s question 1. "Why do you want to work at [company]?"

This will get a BS answer, for everyone it boils down to having to work for money to live on. I would not screen or hire (or not hire) someone based on his or her ability (or inability) to come up with a clever or cunning response to this type of question.

I believe in hiring the type of people "that I can motivate to be their best", and who have the skills that the company needs to get the job done. I also believe in giving someone a chance to prove himself or herself as far as job performance goes, and question 1 will tend to favor a clever or cunning writer and possibly screen out a superior candidate who I might want to hire. So I would never ask this type of question.

A better-quality first screening e-mail question might include a statement related to the job and be more mission critical and function specific such as:

"This job requires long hours coding in PHP in the Zend Studio coding environment. In one paragraph please describe your experience using Zend Studio to code PHP, including how long you have been coding PHP and how long you have been using Zend."

This type of question will let me sort candidates quickly based on the required skill set.

Jason’s question 2. "Describe a situation in your work-life where you failed."

I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t want to spend my day reading through 100 e-mails about peoples failures in life. This type of question gives the reader absolutely nothing to sort candidates on. Johnny A. failed at getting his MCSE certification 3 times because his laptop kept breaking. Sally Q. failed to get promoted to Engineer Level II because her boss secretly hated her, ect, etc, etc...

I don’t hire failures! Sure everyone has setbacks but having someone highlight their setbacks in an e-mail won’t tell me what I want to know to sort candidates on. It would be much more useful to have the candidate explain their fit regarding another mission critical job function such as:

"This position is in a small start-up company that we intend to grow quickly. To help the company reach its goals will require long hours and a lot of dedication on your part. One thing we look for when hiring is a little something extra in the candidates skill set because multi-tasking will probably be required of whomever we hire.

In addition to your PHP skills please describe in one paragraph any knowledge or experience you may have regarding administrating in an MS Server 2003 (or 2008) domain environment and/or experience with server or client backups and restores."

With this type of question I can tell at a glance if I’m going to get more for my hiring dollars. More efficient use of the company’s human recourses.

Jason’s question 3. "Describe a time when you accomplished something you thought was impossible. (Can be work-related or personal)"

Again no information to sort potential candidates on. Simply another who has the more cunning writing skills question.

I would not even bother with a third question because I don’t want to read 100 extra e-mail paragraphs.

I would simply state, "We will reply to those we think are the top 10 candidates via e-mail by next Monday to schedule an in person meeting. Please attach your resume in Word or pdf format for consideration. Thank You.".

This is a much more simple and useful approach to screening candidates, and it will not favor those who have more clever writing skills or exclude those who really should be given a chance to perform highly at your company.

Working for a good startup is a great opportunity to grow rich from your efforts. You don’t want to exclude "the best people" just because they failed to come up with witty answers to unimportant questions.