OK, I think the number one thing to ensure about this business, if you want to revolutionize hiring, is to show that it works. If I can apply this idea to my potential hires, I'm going to give you all the dollars because the alternative is spending my team's precious cycles on interviewing.
I think there are a lot of paths that lead to your business making money but ultimately going down a path towards "yet another technical certification" - technical certifications are a negative hiring signal for a good reason. Avoiding this pitfall, I think, is the hardest part but perhaps the key to success.
This is a pretty good article, I talk a lot about hiring in the tech industry because I believe passing on a good candidate is far more opportunity cost than people realize. It far outweighs the material cost of wasting a weeks time and money with a bad candidate. Bad candidates are easy to spot within a week on the job, good candidates are easy to miss in an interview. I think interviewing and hiring is way over thought and as such is killing companies and their ability to find talent. This article provides a good simple view of hiring as such I think it has great value in helping people build a simplified model for hiring.
They didn't work 20 years ago, still don't work, however interviewing someone like they're a person, asking questions, finding their passion, that has had 100% return for me and my companies.
Word of mouth has been the best way I've been able to hire a lot of really skilled people. My team members have told me many times that I'm the best manager they've ever had.
It's because I don't do anything the way you're supposed to.
Try being a place worth working for and you'll see skilled people show up, and they know how to get ahold of you since they're highly skilled and motivated.
Maybe, but my mantra is a mix. I use standard technical questions ect. to weed out candidates that cannot do the job - I try to stay general such that I see problem solving, rather than certification. Then I'm left with a pool of people that are real potential hires. After that I'm looking for a learner with the right mindset, and THEN I'm looking for a fit - preferably someone who will complement the team, rather than reinforce what is already working.
Hiring is not an exact science, and what works for me, is probably not working for others.
Hiring is hard because understanding people is hard.
There's also the problem of selection bias. Your technical interviewers are going to look for people that resemble themselves. In a broad sense this is because they think they're smart and everyone else is dumb (and rightly so). The problem is that this strategy can be far too successful and you will invariably turn away a perfectly suitable selection of candidates along with the unsuitable ones. It's human nature and difficult to detect.
There is another form of selection bias in the interview process. You need to know that the candidate you're going to hire is going to be competent, assertive, and talented. However the exact match of skills, abilities, and personality traits that fulfill those broad categories are going to be based off of those skills, abilities, and traits you believe have helped you to be successful so far. When interviewing someone it is far too easy to check off the features a candidate is lacking and miss the ones they do have that you do not. A good hire, IMO, is someone who has some of the skills and abilities you already have and some you do not. Yet all too often, we look for people who have ALL of the skills we already have instead.
I think strategies such as the one in the article would at least by-pass many of the definicies noted above. However I think it might be impractical in some scenarios (ie: when the candidate is already in a position at another company, or when they have received attractive offers from other companies). It's a start though and I think alternative strategies should be considered more often.
It doesn't matter if they can't hire good talent. The guys running these businesses believe they're "just making tools for the good guys" (actual interview quote from a psychotic surveillance company I turned down a while back). We want to make sure they can only recruit the dumbest codemonkeys and spaghetti chefs that money can buy so their products go nowhere.
This comment boils down precisely what I’ve always thought is the key problem in tech hiring. Companies overestimate the cost of a bad hire and underestimate the benefit of taking a risk and having it pay off.
To borrow from poker: it’s commonly understood that if you’re not “caught bluffing” at least a little, it means you’re not bluffing enough. If your hiring process results in zero bad hires, you are playing it way too safe and I guarantee you are missing out on phenomenal candidates.
Great recruiters would know both ends of the equation, and knowing that, make good calls. I'm actually of the opinion that most technical companies are bad at hiring. The only strategy that can be formalized and generalized is to error on the side of caution, but this can be a problem in the current job market where it's hard to find good people and you can't afford false negatives.
IMO, it's just good positioning (as in market positioning) for getting hired through an alternative process, with a higher (presumably) payoff.
You prove you can build the prototype, de-risking the hirer's decision to pay you more than a normal hire. This reasoning presumes that the 'normal' hiring process and market resembles a lemon market. This is my IMHO. Bad hires drag down all participant's perceived value and compensation.
At risk of ruining a great spiel, I’d assume it boils down to “it’s amazingly foolhardy to target the candidate pool of people who have already done what you’re trying to do, when there’s a much larger pool of people who haven’t already done that thing but are readily capable of doing it”.
Tech skills and domain knowledge are transferable and learnable. So if you’re targeting hires, maybe aim for people who excel in non-transferable skills and then just teach them (or pay them to learn) the domain skills.
There’s also the side benefit that if you hire a person and ask them to repeat something they’ve done before, you still need to figure out a growth path for them. But if you hire a person and ask them to do a new-to-them thing, you have the bones of a growth path baked in.
Of course we can't. Practice is critical in mastering a skill, and frankly as an industry we really don't practice the skill of recognizing the best people. At all.
Hiring processes throughout the industry are entirely non-rigorous, and there is almost never any loop-closing when it comes to hiring signals and eventual job performance.
We are spectacularly bad at recognizing talent because we've never sat down and rigorously connected signals to success and failure.
Tech hiring is the ultimate cargo cult. It goes through fads (remember when logic puzzles where the thing?), and works primarily via arguments that sound logical but were never even remotely verified. It's monkey see monkey do at a mass level.
Another solution to this problem is contract to hire. I realize this is kicking the can down the road to the contracting firm but hear me out: that's the business the contracting firm is in. They can get really good at their hiring practice since that's their core business. That's not our core business. We've been doing this for the past two years and it's worked out great. Now you can see how well people do the actual job and if you're not satisfied, which happens from time to time, just get someone else.
Biggest point here. You can't flunk out 90% of your applications and complain you have a shortage of qualified staff. You have people begging to work for you, how about you hire a few of them and teach them anything that's missing. Oh the horror, the employees aren't replaceable meat cogs in some giant machine.
This is daft, it’s assuming the only thing important in hiring is previous technical experience. As Dee Hock said : “ Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.”
Unfortunately, there are way too many unqualified people out there applying for jobs and ruining it for the rest of us. As a hiring for manager for years, I've seen a huge number of people try to fake their way through interviews. They can talk vaguely and grandiosely about all the technical problems they solved at their past jobs or in school. But the breakdown always happens when you ask them to solve a problem for you.
Sure, they may be undiscovered geniuses who are too nervous to think straight. But where there's smoke, there's fire, and in this case behind the smoke are ten other people lined up to interview for the same job. All things being equal in terms of general personability and hygiene, the one who displays technical competence gets the job. Just imagine if the odds weren't so skewed in favor of job hunters. When the economy slows, when your jobs are really subject to outsourcing to a lowest bidder overseas for a fraction of the price, these sympathy hires will be a thing of the past.
> Build work-sample tests.
Instead of asking questions about the kind of work you do, have candidates actually do the work.
Careful. I am not saying candidates should spend a 2-week trial period as a 1099 contractor. That’s a terrible plan: the best candidates won’t do it. But more importantly: it doesn’t work. Unlike a trial period, work sample tests have all three of these characteristics:
they mirror as closely as possible the actual work a candidate will be called on to perform in their job,
they’re standardized, so that every candidate faces the same test,
they generates data and a grade, not a simple pass/fail result.
My experience has consistently been that the only reliable way to tell how good someone is is to work with them on a real project. Since that actually works, and nothing else does, I'd say it's the interview and hiring processes that are broken.
I think there are a lot of paths that lead to your business making money but ultimately going down a path towards "yet another technical certification" - technical certifications are a negative hiring signal for a good reason. Avoiding this pitfall, I think, is the hardest part but perhaps the key to success.
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