We only hire the trendiest

I'm one of those underrated engineers who has had trouble getting past nearly every phase of the hiring process at various times. It's frustrating because I'm pretty smart and very passionate about building software, especially tools.

This bias against having the wrong keywords on your resume is incredibly unproductive,I agree, but I would guess it's a result of how little you can actually tell about someone from just a page or two of their work history, which is all most companies have to go on from a resume alone.

I am dying to get some company to take a chance on me, to someday have the benefit of a real mentor, and to be given a real opportunity to feed all this ambition that just won't go away.

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in that, either. We're here, we're waiting, and we are legion. It's time for a solution to the problem of how to put us in touch with all those hiring managers that complain about how hard it is to find talent.

One of the things I typically told my employees and coworkers to do was to avoid psycho-analyzing someone based on small wordings and behaviors in responses.

Really, hiring is imperfect - I did try to hire people who were high energy, friendly, and not likely trying to suck up or B.S. through an interview - but there's a lot of things you can't really tell.

Many interview questions - such as targetted selection - can find negatives to not hire someone, but are easy to bypass if someone knows how those questions work (always give answers that cast you in a favorable light, etc) and are good at interviewing.

I agree that a lot of places do screen too much on cultural fit, but on the other hand, people want to work with people that will be good to work with - and they will have a LOT of time to spend with these people.

In days where we so closely identify with our work, I can see wanting people who could possibly become friends.

This becomes dangerous when it trends into ageism, or reduces the ability of very well qualified people to get a shot, and I've seen firsthand this result in some places hiring a lot of young folks that THOUGHT they knew a lot, but were really at a sophomoric level of experience.

Really good products come out of a diversity of experience and technical backgrounds. However, if someone is going to clash with the team, it's somewhat also better for them to not be working with that team - sometimes - but sometimes it may also work out great.

There's really not a good answer here, only tradeoffs.

People are squishy and complicated.

I tried to limit psycho-analysis and culture fit to "are these good, honest, and mostly friendly people".

I also believe smart people can learn almost anything, and often technical criteria or even small tech preferences that are not clear-cut can be used as code for really not hiring someone for culture fit.

Sometimes I feel a greater danger in interviewing is not allowing the interviewee a good enough picture of what is wrong about the company they are joining - often, interviews feel like sales pitches at the candidate, or focus primarily on the candidate's abilities and background, not hitting most of the things that will really say "will they be happy here".

Identify 5 or 6 qualities that are essential to the success of your team. Tailor your questions around evaluating for those. Interview a bunch of people, score them on a scale of 1 to 5 for each of those categories. Resist your gut feeling. Then hire the ones with the highest score.

He acknowledges that it's crude but it was more successful than their previous process and makes as much sense as anything else I've read on the subject of hiring.

Amusingly, when he got pushback from the interviewing team for not allowing them to follow their well-honed instincts, he agreed to add "Gut Feeling" as one of the 5 or 6 parameters on which candidates would be scored. That detail, for me, sums up the man's brilliance.

Really my comment was just to help demystify why this sort of thing doesn't happen in many companies based on my own observations.