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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)

#381

Post by HarryHirsch »

pascalxus wrote: post #341
digitalsushi wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Perhaps, don't take it too literally. I suspect that comment must have been out of desperation, a satirical comment meant to criticize their woefully inadequate hiring process.

From what I've seen in academia, this is a surprisingly adequate process. I've seen them do phone interviews, Skype interviews, divinations, psychometrical testings, on-sites - and then none of their unicorns is right colour. The commitee declares a failed search and tries again the following semester.

You'd think that many, if not most of the people in the applicant pile could do an adequate job, perhaps with some training, considering what the job market looks like in the life sciences. Instead they play precious and then they have to make do with some last-minute lecturer, and that at times plays out really bad.

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

#382

Post by oldandtired »

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 don't want to be too critical, but you have a number of grammatical errors in your comment. I believe this shows how easy it can be to get at least 2 typographical errors in even a short piece of communication. I am sure that this comment will infringe on someone's standard.

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

#384

Post by FilterSweep »

malvosenior wrote: post #266
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…

> So if I take time off to watch our child while my wife rebuilds her career, and maybe move to a different career myself, somehow I'm penalized? Pardon my language, but fuck that. No offense but this reads as fairly entitled. Why would your value continue to rise as an employee if you take time out of your career? You will be competing against people who are bettering themselves without taking > 1 year breaks. It’s…

Dubious claim.

15 hr/week while unemployed working on your own app may be far more beneficial than 60 hr/week working on a trivial CRUD app.

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

#385

Post by ballenf »

einarfd wrote: post #367
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 consider it evidence of carelessness - I don't care if you can't spell, but I do care if you don't bother to run it past someone else who can for editing. Getting someone to look over your stuff and looking for spelling errors sounds like a simple and easy fix doesn’t it? But in my experience that doesn't work as well as one would think, prof reading is a lot harder than it looks. After all it's isn't enough to c…

I too have close family members with dyslexia. If they asked whether they'd make good programmers, I'd honestly tell them that their disability would make it very challenging and frustrating. They could still do it, but their passion would have to be enough to drive them to work much harder than their colleagues to achieve the same results.

I'd also recommend that they go to whatever lengths necessary to eliminate typos in their resume because it's a prime opportunity to demonstrate that they can achieve exacting precision when necessary.

That being said, they are all happy in careers where character-for-character precision is not as important.

Re: typos in resumes, I'm less strict than I used to be and try to focus more on work experience or other real world metrics than using typos as a proxy for programming productivity.

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

#386

Post by wolfgke »

jstewartmobile wrote: post #380
humanrebar wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there insurance for this sort of thing? Seems like an external risk that needs to be mitigated somehow.

There are alternative risk markets where you can get insured for just about anything, but it's still a cost that gets disproportionately shouldered by employers of young men.

Just reduce the salary for reservists by the amount that "his/her" insurance costs.

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

#387

Post by sbuttgereit »

afpx wrote: post #301
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’,…

I think there probably is a tech shortage in terms of strong candidates. I've worked with some companies where there are people that are employed as "developers", but they can't tell you the simplest of basics; I don't consider myself a developer, yet my meager knowledge and understanding far exceeds the skills of some of these people. I see more of these types than you'd think could survive for long (much of my work is outside of SV and with non-tech companies). When these types enter the job market, the local maximum they've been in for some time tells them that they're developers and they think they can apply to some of these more sophisticated gigs. But there's a clear distinction between these people that mostly copied code from SO and elsewhere in the code base and got it to work vs. those that actually devised the methods they're using... and I think there are many more at this lower end of the spectrum than there are at the higher end: just the bar is so much lower.

As for companies innovating in this regard, it's kinda funny to think about it. When it first got started, I think LinkedIn was trying to be exactly this. Rather than encouraging people to add any and every person they ever thought about (or that asked), the idea was that you should only add those people that you know and trust. In this way, you could use your LinkedIn network as a network of trust for things like hiring or looking for work. That's changed I think both by LinkedIn wanting to have a large network of data to mine and by any number of participants that will add connections since they're really after a bulk network rather than a trusted network. In both cases the business case for such a network of trust doesn't seem to work well for the company providing the service and doesn't work well for the participants... so it breaks. Naturally, that's just one approach and there could be others, but I do think there have been efforts here.

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

#388

Post by oldandtired »

pklausler wrote: post #346
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know about the original poster, but I'll immediately spot every error in spelling, punctuation, and usage in a ten-second skim of a page. My eyes just go right to them. And yes, I consider that it's difficult to write correct English. But if you're willing to send out an erroneous resume without getting it competently reviewed, I have to suspect the depth of your commitment to quality overall.

It is obvious that you did not scan your comment for any errors for 10 seconds before you submitted it. Try a little game and find the error you have made.

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

#389

Post by wooter »

oldandtired wrote: post #382
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 don't want to be too critical, but you have a number of grammatical errors in your comment. I believe this shows how easy it can be to get at least 2 typographical errors in even a short piece of communication. I am sure that this comment will infringe on someone's standard.

really? you don't think its evidence that we invest varying levels of effort into things we care about? thusly, a candidate with typographical errors is closer internet-comment-level interested effort-wise in the position.

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

#390

Post by morgante »

linkregister wrote: post #290
adamnemecek wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody wants to hire only the mediocre. Employee education is such an undervalued idea. Like you can get workers on the cheap and then setup incentives for education/self-education. I'm yet to see a company that sets up some sort of education pipeline for it's employees. I know that startups don't have time and or money but education doesn't need to be as long as the school system made you believe.

A few notable organizations offer paid continuing education (Masters degrees) and have extensive in-house training, with career progression mapped out. Here are some: - Accenture - Booz Allen Hamilton - Deloitte - Department of Defense - Lockheed Martin - Northrop Grumman - Raytheon It’s not just consulting companies and the defense industrial complex, these are just the only companies I have exposure to that offer m…

> I haven’t seen a serious investment in education from Bay Area companies, probably because attrition is higher and it’s not seen as a safe investment.

Google provides partial tuition reimbursement: https://www.quora.com/Does-Google-provide-100-tuition-reimbu...

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