I just added a rockstar to our team.
Are they perfect? Of course not. The “perfect” candidate is a myth.
If you are a hiring manager, the real questions you should ask are: Am I willing and able to bridge this person’s development gaps? Can I cover their weaknesses? Can I create the environment in which they will thrive and push them beyond what they thought was possible?
As Steve Jobs said, “My job is to not be easy on people. My job is to make them better.”
Let me tell you what impressed me about our new rockstar. They are incredibly goal-oriented. They work hard, move fast, and do not tire easily. They can work on several tasks at once. During technical testing, they showed a strong ability to decompose problems. Evidence showed that they receive direct feedback without fuss and can give it respectfully (radical candor is a key value for us). Overall: low-maintenance and gets along with others.
Sounds great… almost.
At the risk of sounding like a jerk, let me practice some radical candor. This rockstar has some gaps.
There is evidence they make more mistakes when requirements and objectives are unclear. They do not handle ambiguity or conflicting information especially well. At times, they lack humility when evaluating their own work. They struggle when conditions change in the middle of an assignment. Subjective quality is a challenge. And they are not an excellent communicator.
This rockstar still needs management support.
Even if they were perfect, your job as a manager is to provide an environment where they can thrive. That includes:
- a computer, software and tools (hopefully easy to use);
- expectations in terms of clear objectives and requirements;
- feedback so they know where to improve or when to keep going;
- a way to measure progress and evaluate what is good;
- access to the information and people they need to do the job;
- a safe environment to protect them from mistakes, and management cover on moral, legal, and organizational responsibility; and
- an understanding of how their work supports the overall mission.
Can you think of a time when you were excited about a hire, only for it not to work out? Where does the fault lie?
It’s the same for AI agents. And, no surprise, my rockstar is actually an AI agent.
One way to describe what Diorthos does: a talent, HR, and IT platform, but for AI agents. We enable you to successfully onboard AI agents to perform the tasks they are naturally a great fit for. That requires giving them:
- access to their own machine;
- tools purpose-built for them;
- the necessary permissions to work within the organization and its key systems;
- the context for the company, the domain, and their responsibilities, with clear objectives;
- access to clean data, logically ordered and arranged;
- a way to work autonomously, with just-in-time cover for important human decisions; and
- the ability to interact with other employees through your company’s messaging and collaboration platform.
I mentioned tasks that are “naturally a great fit.” There are many, but AI agents excel at tasks we can test and measure, that have a clear objective, and where you can run closed-loop optimization.
This is what it takes to put AI agents into production.
