> 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.
The problem is that "competent staff" are still under conditions of low information, deluged with resumes from unsuitable candidates, and lacking suitable discriminating power between the resumes they do see. I'd encourage you to look through 100 random resumes online and try to decide who you'd hire; most likely, you will pick someone like yourself, not someone who's best for the job. In other words, don't hate the player, hate the game, because otherwise you will end up hating yourself.
I think what's ultimately needed is a way to reveal more information about a candidates' abilities in a very short amount of time. Contract-to-hire works for this, but has the problem that many candidates (and in particular, good candidates) don't have time to devote to a project that may lead to a job. So does tokenadult's persistent suggestion of a work-sample test (and HireArt's implementation), but these both have the problem of being able to cut down an employee's daily duties into a small problem that can be given as a short task. Many of the skills that a really experienced employee brings to the table are only evident on long, hard, extremely challenging problems.
Just hire people based on how well they can do a job. You don't have to pigeonhole people into one of your shitty mental categories and then hire them.
Sure, but usually you don't want to hire _all_ of the good applicants - the reason you get bad hires is the false positive rate, not because there aren't enough total good hires in the pile.
That's the problem with so many attempts to "correct" hiring. Especially for more senior roles, the best people you want to hire usually already have jobs, or they have a pick among different companies. Make the hiring process too onerous and you end up selecting for the most desperate people.
I don't know how you'd get a good signal from a "work-sample test" in under a week or so, in which case you've basically weeded out most of the people you want to hire.
There is a large research base on how companies can hire to gain the best workers. The smart thing to do is ask job candidates to go through a work-sample test. An additional thing to do (which involves some special legal steps in the United States, but can be done routinely in other countries) is to give each job candidate an IQ test. Evidence to back up these statements can be found in a FAQ
I've posted here on HN from time to time, which I expect to add to my personal website in a while. A job candidate who doesn't want to do a work-sample test is a job candidate who doesn't want to work for a smart employer.
Great advice. Additionally, for me, the most important thing (from painful experience) is to give candidates a test run to see if they fit in and measure up.
Too easy to hire someone because they're likeable, and/or be taken in by past experience, and then realise the horrible truth: they're awful at their job!
The other possibility is that the good people already have jobs, and it is the ones who aren't good who repeatedly apply for positions.
Also, we already had everyone on the team go through the test. I went through it myself before seeing the questions, and then tweaked it afterwards removing things I thought weren't going to give a good enough signal to noise ratio. It's not like we're pulling up the ladder behind us or something. Maybe we have high standards, but I've worked on teams before where hiring was less strict and there are people capable of getting negative work done. I'm not going to risk having these people on my team, even if it artificially bumps up my hiring numbers.
When someone comes along whose code is so good that a small-to-medium percentage of it is more than enough for a decent employer to rake in the bucks on, it would be downright medieval for us to hire such a candidate.
We have habitually been screening for and only considering below-average performers using proven techniques and experience has shown that bringing in just a single average-to-above-average performer will disrupt everything and only result in making everyone else look bad.
I agree strongly. But part of the problem with this solution is that you might be caught with a stream of merely adequate people you won't hire because you're afraid of false positives. I also think it's sometimes okay to hire merely adequate people, if you know ahead of time you can quarantine their usefulness to one area they seem stellar at.
Result: mediocre candidates desperate for a job try so hard to get everything done, but the great engineer has plenty of options and does not want to spend 10h on a test. In the end all great people that you would like to hire quit in the process.
How about, just hire the people who can do the work, as verified by a work-sample test, and set up a company culture that welcomes everyone who can do the work?
AFTER EDIT: Another reply asked, "How about a guide to hiring the best person for the job?" I notice that the user's username is green, which means he is new here, so perhaps he hasn't yet seen my FAQ on that subject, which I compiled from the helpful comments of many other HN participants. The latest full posting of that FAQ
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.
This is a valuable experiment to run for any hiring process.
Generally, you want to select for successful employees in your company, which hirers normally are. If they can't get selected, something is very very wrong with your process.
We would like to know who is competent before we hire them. The point is that we do these types of tests so that we don't hire them in the first place.
We can't hire everybody. I can't hire 20 people (then fire 19 of them) for the 1 position in the 8 Person team I want to fill. That can't work.
Just hiring someone and then firing them 2 weeks later is expensive as fuck. We can't just do that until we find someone actually competent.
Your "easy solution" is only easy if you don't think about it at all.
Okay so clearly hiring people just like you is probably not a good idea, not just because the qualities that led you to be a founder are likely present in the prospective employee but also because you're likely to suffer from confirmation bias if you hire someone that thinks in a similar manner to yourself. However, that said, this article does a horrible job of prescribing an adequate solution to hiring practices: personality tests? Are you kidding? Easily foiled, especially when you understand its purpose, i.e. to assess whether you work well with others. Someone in need of a job is probably able to not only trick the testers but also themselves into believing they have the qualities necessary to get along in the work environment. A better solution might be temporary work that has the possibility of becoming full-time. While this isn't always possible, it should be possible to at least ask for and follow up on references for any perspective employee.
You might not be sure, but high quality candidates who aren't already in the heterogenous pool you are hiring from can probably come up with something.
https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/
> 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.
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