Why the "Beer Test" is a Terrible Hiring Strategy—But a Great Employee Strategy

This essay is autogenerated from my x.com threads.

The "beer test"—hiring someone based on whether you'd want to grab a drink with them after work—is one of the worst ways to screen potential employees. It leads to homogeneity, fosters bias, and limits the diversity of thought that businesses need to thrive. But for an employee? It’s actually a useful framework.

Most people spend more waking hours with their coworkers than they do with their families or friends. In a fast-paced environment, that could mean 10-12 hours a day, five or six days a week. If you’re spending that much time in one place, wouldn’t it be better if it was with people you actually like?

The reality is, people are only willing to work just for money up to a point. Eventually, they start looking for meaning, connection, and shared values in their workplace. They don’t just want a job; they want a culture they can belong to. This is something every company needs to understand if they want to attract and retain top talent.

A while back, I wrote about how the beer test is a bad hiring metric. You shouldn’t be asking, “Would I have a beer with this person?” when making a hiring decision. But here’s the irony: many candidates will be asking themselves that question about you. Maybe not beer—maybe it’s coffee, wings, hibachi, or a kombucha—but the sentiment is the same.

Employees don’t want to feel like outsiders in their own company. They want to join a place where work doesn’t feel like work. That’s why the first five hires in a company matter so much—they shape the next five, and the five after that, until you have a company culture that either thrives or stagnates.

In our business, we take an “Always Be Selling” approach to hiring. Every interview is an opportunity to showcase who we are, what we value, and how we operate. Yes, we do this to attract the best talent, but just as importantly, it gives candidates the chance to decide if we’re the kind of place they’d want to grab a drink with after work.

What you don’t want is to invest months hiring and training someone, only to find out that they never fit the culture to begin with—something that could have been figured out earlier.

So if you do the beer test right, you won’t be hiring people just because you’d want to have a drink with them. You’ll be hiring people who would actually be happiest working at your company—because that’s what keeps them around.