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We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

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Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#301

Post by afpx »

beat wrote: post #275

So here's the thing... hiring at larger, growing companies often means weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles. Most of those resumes need to go away. The interview process, for competent candidates, is going to cost you at bare minimum a half hour of one person's time for initial screening. A quality interview is going to take a couple of hours each for a few important people - man…

First, there may not be a tech shortage if teams are “weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles....”

But, if there is, I’m assuming that candidates are just applying randomly to any positions that are available. The ‘Tinder’ strategy is probably a good one if the goal is to maximize earnings. However, if one is a ‘5’ it makes sense to spam all of the positions. But, if one is a ‘10’, it makes sense to avoid interviewing all together because there is diminishing returns: too much work for too little potential gain.

So, the other question is if the hiring process is so ineffective, why aren’t companies innovating? There must be lack of competition in the market if companies are willing to wait several months and spend thousands of dollars to fill a role while also missing out on the best candidates.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#302

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

brightball wrote: post #126
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you’ve been doing .NET or PHP for 5+ years without even trying something else I’d treat it as a red flag too. But if I put other languages on my resume outside of .NET, I might look unfocused or "not specialized". Plus, some people treat resume skills as an expert matter, so if I'm only doing hobby stuff, the conversation might not be that interesting (hobby projects usually never pay technical debt so I can just…

I’ve never even heard of an interviewer knocking someone for having more than one language on their resume. I’m not saying you need 10 or all the trendiest things. You need at least 2. Programming is a job of constant problem solving. If you’ve done the job close to 10 years and never seen a problem with the language that you are using...that actually tells me more about you than any other question I can answer. It t…

> You could meet that criteria in a single weekend if you wanted to.

So, basically, it's just a absurd arbitrary criterion? I don't think there's anybody on the planet who could claim proficiency in a new language in a single weekend's exposure. Most won't even remember anything it about a week later with that little exposure. Logically, your requirement is meaningless.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#303

Post by Gargoyle »

beat wrote: post #275

So here's the thing... hiring at larger, growing companies often means weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles. Most of those resumes need to go away. The interview process, for competent candidates, is going to cost you at bare minimum a half hour of one person's time for initial screening. A quality interview is going to take a couple of hours each for a few important people - man…

This is fine if it's how you want to handle it, but you can not ever complain about a shortage of qualified candidates.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#304

Post by pnutjam »

alskdfji wrote: post #232

This was the most depressing part to me: "Another person I know is in a similar situation because his group won’t talk to people who aren’t already employed." It's a long story, but both my wife and I have most recently been at places, in a small-medium city, that have had huge turnover in the last several years due to mismanagement (her entire unit, except for her, left twice while she was working with them; we've l…

You've got a PHD, your probably very specialized. This definitely closes alot of doors for you, but it's you closing the doors.

I don't envy the years I could look through the want ads and say to myself, I can do that, I can do that, I can do that. I prefer now, even though it's a bit a crap shoot whether someone is looking to fill a position with my skill set.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#305

Post by FLUX-YOU »

beat wrote: post #275

So here's the thing... hiring at larger, growing companies often means weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles. Most of those resumes need to go away. The interview process, for competent candidates, is going to cost you at bare minimum a half hour of one person's time for initial screening. A quality interview is going to take a couple of hours each for a few important people - man…

If you're going to filter on typos, you may as well put a hackerrank/leetcode question as the initial filter, or invent your own question. That will save you and your team more time since you will only get respondents that pass and you don't need to review every resume yourself for typos.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#306

Post by wanderingbort »

beat wrote: post #275

So here's the thing... hiring at larger, growing companies often means weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles. Most of those resumes need to go away. The interview process, for competent candidates, is going to cost you at bare minimum a half hour of one person's time for initial screening. A quality interview is going to take a couple of hours each for a few important people - man…

> It's irresponsible.

While I agree, it would be irresponsible to exhaustively interview isn't a key metric for a _good_ hiring process how efficiently you can find/place candidates who _do_ excel in the role?

By that turn, shouldn't a responsible hiring manager constantly be evaluating and improving their heuristics so that their front-line filtering is less biased and stupid in the ways that materially affect the quality of hires?

I don't think the point is that we can remove heuristic filtering from the process. Heuristics are necessary in hiring but this doesn't justify being dismissive of a discussion about whether a certain class of heuristics is really serving the needs of the organization.

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#307

Post by symlinkk »

alien_at_work wrote: post #182
jstewartmobile wrote: post #86

It would be nice if the process were a little more transparent. If people just knew that a company rejected them for reason X, that would make a huge difference. If X were stupid, they'd know they missed a bullet. If X were rooted in a misunderstanding, they'd have a chance to clear it up. There is so much side-channel information used in the corporate hiring process, and it gets mixed-up in HR far more often than an…

I think the issue is the massive, massive power imbalance. Sure, as a worker you would like those things, but an employer has no reason to care. Even if they make a mix-up there are plenty of other candidates for the same position. Maybe they get someone actually worse but they have no way to know that and no reason to care. For the employee it's a rejection from 1 out of 1-10 companies they are talking to, so it's a…

sounds like the dating market

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#308

Post by volkk »

digitalsushi wrote: post #281
beat wrote: post #275

So here's the thing... hiring at larger, growing companies often means weeding through a stack of a hundred resumes, for one or two or five roles. Most of those resumes need to go away. The interview process, for competent candidates, is going to cost you at bare minimum a half hour of one person's time for initial screening. A quality interview is going to take a couple of hours each for a few important people - man…

i overheard this in an elevator, "our HR department tosses the bottom half of resumes in the pile into the trash because we refuse to hire unlucky people"

ha. except perhaps they're the unlucky ones because they chucked out a great engineers resume and the engineer is actually the lucky one ;)

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#309

Post by brightball »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #302
brightball wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve never even heard of an interviewer knocking someone for having more than one language on their resume. I’m not saying you need 10 or all the trendiest things. You need at least 2. Programming is a job of constant problem solving. If you’ve done the job close to 10 years and never seen a problem with the language that you are using...that actually tells me more about you than any other question I can answer. It t…

> You could meet that criteria in a single weekend if you wanted to. So, basically, it's just a absurd arbitrary criterion? I don't think there's anybody on the planet who could claim proficiency in a new language in a single weekend's exposure. Most won't even remember anything it about a week later with that little exposure. Logically, your requirement is meaningless.

Addressed here already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15593500

Re: We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016)

#310

Post by jamesmp98 »

twoquestions wrote: post #124

Damn, this paints a picture where only the shiniest candidates matter, and the rest of us mere mortals should apologize for breathing their air. How do you know if you're "the best", and if not, how do you become "the best" (or at least employable), or is this industry a "ya got it or ya don't" kind of place like music or art, where only the top 10% deserve to make a living?

This is how I see the future of the industry. Either that, or wages get driven down so low that it's not a career worth pursuing anymore
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