We only hire the best means we only hire the trendiest (2016) • Hacker News Board

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

#451

Post by beat » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 6:18 PM UTC

Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #399

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…

"Let me randomly filter these and hope for the best" is the essence of your suggestion for screening candidates. It doesn't sound very good. It sounds like you should be investing more time into interviewing more people instead of throwing away folks who could excel, but fail an arbitrary heuristic. That is to say, instead of throwing away 19 out of 20... don't throw away so many. Obviously you don't need to call in…

The thing is, it's not "random". I have a good reason for my filter - it represents attention to detail. And yes, it will exclude the occasional good candidate, but it will exclude far more bad candidates.

If I have 100 resumes for two roles, and I can, through heuristics, knock it down to five, then I'm starting with enough "good" resumes to stand at least a chance of filling the two roles. Mind you, we're now about a day's worth of work for a manager, and five interrupted afternoons for the senior/lead engineers doing the interviews.

On top of that, the good candidates are going to have other companies competing for them. If my response is "Well, we like this candidate, but let's spend two weeks interviewing another twenty people, just to be sure", my odds of missing the good candidate are pretty high.

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

#452

Post by ballenf » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 6:19 PM UTC

unabst wrote: post #428

ballenf wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I never thought about it that way. You have single-handedly changed the advice I'd give to my family on the issue. (Except for the resume advice above, which I think still holds.)

> but I do care if you don't bother to run it past someone else who can for editing. Even Chrome has a spell checker. Not sure the distinction here between code typos and English typos is a valid one. The OP is saying not bothering to check is the issue, not the specific errors. And this is, by definition, careless. This is a lack of caring for correctness and a lack of awareness of mistakes. It could even be conside…

Screening is all about finding good proxies for the skills you need for the position. Typos on resumes might be a good proxy for something, but not necessarily attention to detail (since you don't know the process the resume went through to get into its error-free state). At the extremes, the proofing could have been forced on them unwillingly by an overbearing parent or partner -or- the applicant could have painstakingly run the resume through every checker out there and begged for lots of feedback from others.

It's more accurately a proxy for the applicant understanding the context of various processes and the relative importance of a task. That may or may not be a skill you need in the job.

Finally, if the resume error rate is higher or lower than what you observe in the candidate's live, observed writing/coding then you should take note assuming such errors are a proxy for what you're looking for.

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

#453

Post by HeyLaughingBoy » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 6:22 PM UTC

stult wrote: post #391

jgust wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you misspell prof(sic) to make a point, or was that a happy accident?

The prof is in the pudding.

Speaking of correctness...

This has always bothered me because I grew up understanding the correct phrase to be "the proof of the pudding is in the eating" and assumed that the shorter form arose because of people who simply didn't know what it really meant.

So I googled it and it turns out that the short form, "the proof is in the pudding," has been around since the 1920's (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_proof_of_the_pudding_is_i...). So, it's got some legs! I still don't think the short form makes any sense, but at least it's not a recent phenomenon caused by clueless hipsters :-)

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

#454

Post by Retric » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 6:23 PM UTC

js2 wrote: post #410

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…

About that heuristic, when hiring for sysadmins in the early 2000s, I found there to be an inverse relationship between résumé quality and candidate quality (with one notable exception — résumés written in LaTeX were usually of high quality and almost always indicated a quality candidate). Originally I had a similar conception about résumés — they should be one or two pages max, should look nice, and should contain n…

IMO, the root cause of this is companies pre-filter leaving high quality individuals to search longer. If you look at a random sample of all people to look for a job in a given year then say a long absence may be a bad sign.

However, you get a biased sample with obvious rock-stars quickly finding a job. Thus, negative signs on a resume are positively correlated with candidate quality. On the other hand resumes that look great are likely linked to people who regularly fail interviews.

PS: This is less common with collage job fairs where you get closer to a random candidate selection.

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

#455

Post by asveikau » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 6:25 PM UTC

nanodano wrote: post #207

When I hear "we only hire the best" it just sounds like generic crap an HR person added, not a big red flag that they are snobs. I don't think it really means anything. By definition, anyone hiring anyone wants to only hire the best. Nobody wants to hire only the mediocre. If I hear things like that I generally just ignore it. Anyway, the author makes all kinds of unfounded assumptions. Someone with .NET and Windows…

You've got to be careful about assuming things about what people can do based on prior positions.

Speaking personally, I have been employed doing windowsy things for ~10 years, probably being typecast by my stint at Microsoft, but I am willing to bet I can out-unix a very sizeable chunk of candidates who think of themselves as Unix people. (Did some Linux kernel hacking in spare time, have been a home user of different *BSDs for ~17 years, learned C on Unix.. none of this you can tell from my resume)

Not to mention skills from one niche often transfer to another, and smart people with generally applicable skills can cope with the differences pretty quickly.

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

#456

Post by flamedoge » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 6:26 PM UTC

gugagore wrote: post #440

flamedoge wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I referred to with 'rules of the language' was the national standard version of the language. Those are publicly well known and promoted by a majority body. I argue that these rules are much easier to learn than rules of dialects.

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

#457

Post by ggg9990 » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 6:26 PM UTC

nmcfarl wrote: post #402

ballenf wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ty…

So I'm really really biased here. But as a programer with (mild) dyslexia, I have to say I think it's one of the best professional fields for this. We have linters, syntax highlighting editors, pretty printers, compilers and a whole suite of tools to make sure typos never go live. No other other field has these tools, and high paying professional work does in fact require "typo free work" to make it anywhere, in almo…

This is an extremely well written post, did you delegate it?

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

#458

Post by beat » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 6:28 PM UTC

jldugger wrote: post #437

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 fi…

This reminds me of a story about hiring (from a book which name I can't remember offhand). The author was hiring a team in India, and facing an onslaught of thousands of basically identical resumes. How to filter them? So he added "Ruby" as a requirement - not because it was required by the project, but because at that time, only programmers who really cared about their craft learned Ruby. This got rid of 99% of the junk resumes.

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

#459

Post by t420mom » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 6:28 PM UTC

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…

You could probably do just as well with random selection as relying on a heuristic. Most people with relevant training and experience are capable of doing the job, most of those are capable of doing it extremely well when supported with training - probably better than "the best", because their cup is not full.

I've yet to see a resume screening process or interview process that reliably weeds out the 1-5% of bad picks. I have seen screening processes reject perfectly good candidates.

A company could probably do very well by letting go of the idea that you need to find the best candidate in a stack of 100 resumes, and instead just pick anyone with the needed qualifications and support them with training. As the article mentions, the current approach performs poorly and wastes time and money.

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

#460

Post by s73ver_ » Tue, Oct 31, 2017, 6:32 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #34

arethuza wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I fear I might if they continued to wear something overly formal at work" Why would you be bothered about what someone wears at work - formal or informal?

I would be bothered that someone dressing excessively formal might act excessively formally - after all, dressing formally is normally a deliberate display of conformity.

And what's the problem?