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

danluu.com

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

#431

Post by beat »

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…

To be clear here - being a poor speller, due to dyslexia or any other reason, is not the problem. But if you know you are a poor speller, you should have someone who is a good speller edit your resume, looking for spelling errors.

If you know a misspelled resume can cost you a job, and you don't take additional steps to make sure it's spelled correctly, that's careless.

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

#433

Post by FLUX-YOU »

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.

If someone ever ships a bug, I'd have to suspect their commitment to quality overall too, and that's way more relevant than a typo.

I wouldn't want anyone to pay for a resume review because the advice you get from that can be quackery or even conflict with other articles about resume writing (apart from 'no typos', they can pretty much agree on that).

Really, the point was if you're going to use a superficial filter like that, you may as well automate it to something like a code test so you can save yourself even something as small as 10 seconds x N resumes per year.

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

#434

Post by newusertoday »

I think reason people don't want to hire windows/.net is because of very low signal to noise ratio. This makes detecting a good developer very difficult from bad developer as 9/10 times it is a waste of time interviewing them and after doing this for a while u develop unconscious bias towards some technology/platform.

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

#435

Post by beat »

wolfgke wrote: post #398
einarfd wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Getting someone to look over your stuff and looking for spelling errors sounds like a simple and easy fix doesn’t it? There are a lot of people who don't speak English as native language. I, as a non-native speaker learn about very subtle rules of the English language all the time, where the author often explains that even many native speakers are often not aware of these rules and thus write in their own native wr…

Yes, I pointedly confine my filter to spelling errors, not grammar, out of respect for non-native English speakers (or even native English speakers who grew up with other dialects). English grammar can be terribly difficult, even for well educated native speakers. Spelling, on the other hand, has a consistent reference.

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

#436

Post by jsudhams »

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…

Look for large fortune 100 companies and if this is in tech you mostly can get to work remote

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

#437

Post by jldugger »

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…

We can recognize that hiring is a noisy process, and still seek to raise the noise:signal ratio. As long as management doesn't excuse existing heuristics as good enough because all 'heuristics are going to be biased and stupid in some ways'. Like half of engineering is designing new & improved heuristics.

Dan's point is largely that for each new & shiny technology you add to your stack, and then add to your hiring filter, you shrink your hiring pool substantially. You can do new & shiny, or you can hire day 1 productive staff experienced in your tech stack. Many firms look at their budgets and choose the latter, but if you don't have budget to train staff, you probably don't have budget to hire experienced staff either. So while the recruiting slogan is 'we only the best', in practice you get 'we only hire the tiny fraction of new grads who've been researching our exact tech stack in their spare time'.

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

#438

Post by matrix »

the-dude wrote: post #246
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…

Raise the child, build a business from home. I would sign for it in a heartbeat.

Small kids are a lot more work than many people realize. Ditto building a business. Trying to do both at once without being financially independent first is not a choice anyone should make if they can help it.

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

#439

Post by derefr »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #387
afpx wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Hypothesis: these people might not have knowledge, but they're very willing to schlep, and so—with enough effort and iteration—they can take a plan and turn it into working code.

And on the other hand, some people who are very "talented" on paper are nigh-unemployable because they just can't get things done. (They can easily tell someone else how to get the job done, but they have no drive or desire to schlep for themselves.)

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

#440

Post by gugagore »

flamedoge wrote: post #425
wolfgke wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting someone to look over your stuff and looking for spelling errors sounds like a simple and easy fix doesn’t it? There are a lot of people who don't speak English as native language. I, as a non-native speaker learn about very subtle rules of the English language all the time, where the author often explains that even many native speakers are often not aware of these rules and thus write in their own native wr…

The rules of language are simple to learn. Culture and Idioms must be lived and experienced.

What is "simple" is a matter of opinion, but in this case I think your opinion is pretty incorrect. The fact that the "rules" vary with region, generation, level of formality, and so on seems to fly in the face of your claim. Not to mention, most native speakers may speak correctly but cannot articulate a correct list of rules.
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